The 6Ps™
Passion. Pleasure. Purpose. People. Planet. Profits.
Six functions I run my businesses on, and the ones I walked away from because of.
I've had two jobs in my life. Everything else I built, bought into, or broke.
Nearly four decades of that produces a lot of opinions and about six that survive contact with reality. These are the six.
They're not values. I've sat in enough boardrooms to know what values are worth on a wall. These are functions, in the mechanical sense: things that are either running or they aren't, and you can tell which from the outside if you know what you're looking at.
I didn't invent all of them. Three of them have been public since 1994 and I'll come to why that was only half the job.
The three that were already there, and why they weren't enough
People, Planet and Profits arrived as the Triple Bottom Line in 1994. It wasn't wrong. It was half a system.
Then it got hollowed out. It became a reporting standard, a section in a deck, a way to look responsible in front of people who were never going to check. I watched perfectly capable operators learn to produce the paperwork and change nothing about how they ran.
Here's the flaw, and it's structural rather than moral. Every one of those three measures a business from the outside. They'll tell you what to report. They won't tell you why you dread Monday, why the business you built feels like something that happened to you, or why the last improvement programme was executed exactly as designed and moved nothing.
For that you need the other three. They're inside the operator, which is precisely why nobody was measuring them.
You will never outgrow your self-image. Your business will not either.
The six, and what each one costs
- 01
Passion
The ignition source
Passion is what you'd defend without being paid. The problems that engage you before there's any reward, any proof of concept, or any audience.
It isn't enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is borrowed and it fades when the context changes.
What it costs
Honouring this one has cost me money, more than once, and I'd do it again. Money made on something you don't care about is the emptiest money there is, and it buys you a version of your life you didn't order. You hit the number, you make the exit, and you feel nothing at all. That's not burnout. That's finding out you were pointed the wrong way for years.
Without passion, success turns to sedation.
- 02
Pleasure
The standard
Pleasure is the quality of experience you demand of yourself in the doing of the work, not the outcome of it. It's the signal that you're aligned now, rather than at some destination you haven't reached yet.
It doesn't mean easy. Easy is a trap. It means honest.
What it costs
This is the one people find hardest to hear from someone who's spent four decades in business, so let me be blunt about it. The old model told you to tolerate the grind now and enjoy it when you retire. That model has cost more good operators their health, their marriages and their best years than any downturn I've lived through. There's no point reaching your goals if you need a break from yourself when you arrive.
Pleasure is not the reward. It is the signal you are aligned.
- 03
Purpose
The blade
Purpose is the meaningful why that links what you do to how the world improves. It holds the course when passion wavers and pleasure dips.
It isn't found. It's chosen, and the choice carries consequence.
What it costs
Purpose is only real at the point it costs you something, and the bill arrives as work you turn down. I've turned down engagements I wanted, with people I liked, because taking them would have meant operating in a way I'd already said I wouldn't. That's the whole test. Most purpose statements fail because they're unenforceable rather than dishonest. Posters on a wall rarely hold attention.
Purpose without enforcement is performance art.
- 04
People
The amplifier
People is the quality and character of your relationships. Customers, staff, partners, advisers, confidants, and the ones who tell you what you don't want to hear.
It doesn't mean everyone. Quality over volume: right person, right role, right moment.
What it costs
I've crashed companies. Some of them should never have made it off the napkin, and in almost every case I can name the person I should have had in the room and didn't, or the person I kept far too long. Culture isn't what you hope they believe, it's what you let them get away with. Your blind spots are staffed, and admitting the gap feels like weakness right up until the moment it costs you the business.
No one scales alone. Everyone bleeds in silence, or in teams.
- 05
Planet
The reckoning
Planet is sustainability without sanctimony. Consequence awareness, resource stewardship, long-range thinking, and an honest accounting of the residue your decisions leave.
It isn't eco-theatre, a marketing page, or the compulsory section of an investor deck.
What it costs
It costs you the short cut, which is the only thing it ever costs. Every business leaves residue and the question is whether you're building with enough awareness of it to make an intelligent decision. My test is simple and unforgiving: if I wouldn't be comfortable explaining the decision to someone whose judgement I respect, I have my answer and I don't need a framework to tell me.
Your brand becomes folklore, or a cautionary tale. Leave it better than you found it.
- 06
Profits
The scoreboard
Profit is surplus. Energy, capital, attention, freedom. Profit is integrity, measured: it reports whether the inside and the outside of a business agree.
It isn't the goal. It's what a system produces when the other five are right.
What it costs
Nothing, and that's the point people miss. I'm not romantic about money and I'm not embarrassed by it. Five exits I'd call successful and a decent number I'd call satisfactory have taught me that a business that consistently can't turn a profit is almost never looking at a pricing problem or a sales problem. It's looking at an alignment problem, and it'll keep hiring salespeople to fix it.
Surplus is not the goal. It is the reward for structural alignment.
The circuit
- Passion
- ignites
- Pleasure
- sustains
- Purpose
- directs
- People
- amplify
- Planet
- contextualises
- Profits
- validate
and back to Passion
That's the loop, and it pays for itself.
Run all six and a business funds its own next round. Run five and you're borrowing against the sixth. That debt doesn't show in the accounts, which is why it goes unnoticed until it's structural.
Break one and here is what you get
I've run businesses missing one of these, and advised a great many more. The failures aren't random. Each absence produces its own recognisable animal.
| The arrangement | What it produces |
|---|---|
| Passion without profit | Lunacy |
| Profit without purpose | Extraction |
| Purpose without pleasure | Martyrdom |
| Pleasure without planet | Destruction |
| Planet without people | Extinction |
| People without passion | Rehearsing death |
Find yours. Most people know before they reach the end of the list.
What I do about it
I run these six. Not as a discipline I impose on myself on a Monday, but because I've tried the alternatives and they were expensive.
They're also why the advisory practice works the way it does. Manolutions takes this worldview and puts instruments under it: Total QX™, the diagnostics, the engagements. If you want the operational version, with the framework and the tools that act on what it finds, that's where it lives.
If you want the version where I tell you how I got here, that's my story.
Questions I get asked
- Are these your invention?
- Three of them aren't. People, Planet and Profits is John Elkington's Triple Bottom Line, from 1994, and I've never claimed otherwise. What's mine is the argument that those three are the outward half of a six-part system, and that the inward half is the half that makes them run.
- Is this business advice or life advice?
- Both, and I've stopped pretending there's a clean line. The business reflects the operator. That isn't a sentiment I picked up at a conference; it's the most reliable diagnostic I have.
- Do I have to buy something to get the rest?
- No. The whole framework is published, here and at Manolutions, in full, before you pay anyone anything.
- Is the order fixed?
- Yes, when the six are listed as the framework. Each one hands to the next, so a reordered list describes a different thing.
Six functions. Either they're running, or you already know which one isn't.
The 6Ps and Total QX are mine, operated through Manolutions, the advisory practice I founded on the Gold Coast.