What’s Past Is Prologue By Your Choices

“What’s past is prologue” is a quotation by William Shakespeare from his play The Tempest. This expression was first used in The Tempest, Act 2, Scene I. Antonio utilizes it to propose that all that has occurred before that time, the “past”, has “led Sebastian and himself to this opportunity to do what they are about to do: commit murder, or make another choice”.

6 min readSep 15, 2018

In modern times, this expression represents the concept that history creates the circumstances for the present-day. We live in a hyperconnected and morally-interdependent world. How we connect, collaborate, engender trust, deepen loyalty, keep promises, and earn relationship capital is now the source of our distinction today. Whether that be as an individual, team, or company.

Today, businesses and their CEOs are challenged like never before to earn trust with their stakeholders. For CEOs, organizations, and teams to achieve their objectives in this world of accelerating change require declared commitments that stick.

Keeping declared commitments has always been important to higher performing leaders and their businesses. The difference today is the hyper-connectedness and transparency of social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. It has empowered people to participate in the conversations of your marketplace. Your ability to influence opinions through traditional marketing campaigns or public relations programs is rapidly losing its effectiveness. Nothing speaks louder than making and keeping the right commitments to your stakeholders.

The ability to make & keep commitments has become more of a social activity and trust is foundational to these interactions. As just in time teams come together across this ecosystem to innovate and solve problems together, the best way to speed up the trust is for all participants to show or account for their earned Relationship Capital (RC).

A commitment goes beyond just words of intent, but the actions that lead to positive outcomes. Leaders who operate businesses are responsible and accountable for a commitment or suite of commitments. Now multiply these commitments across each member of the organizational team, partners, suppliers, and customers. This creates actions that overcome obstacles and achieves operational excellence.

Your organization is a commitment-oriented entity

Without making and consistently keeping commitments to your customers, you will not be generating the revenues to fund your growth and innovation. This should be news. Your growth comes from building a trusted reputation. Earning the relationship capital that allows others to refer customers, employees, partners, investors, etc. to you. These ambassadors lend their trust to you with each and every referral. Imagine all of your stakeholders as trust ambassadors. This is where it is going. If your kept-commitments are not consistent, the people that support you will not continue to do so.

You also will lose the opportunity to build new additional advocates. Important considerations from leadership expert Marc Michaelson:

Introducing Peer SaaS or “PE-ER: Performing Excellence — Engaging Recognition”

Our vision is to help all businesses grow and nurture their responsiveness and the authenticity of their commitments via commitment management between themselves individually and corporately. Commitment Performance is captured through the feedback tools and scored. Excellence is rewarded. Appreciation and badges can be earned. Regular feedback and Recognition will enhance employee Engagement.

What is the Peer SaaS Platform?

The Peer SaaS platform is a subscription-based SaaS model that provides small business people a way of demonstrating their ability to meet or exceed their clients or employee’s expectations. The product will continue to evolve and grow over time thereby increasing the number of touch points between groups. In general, our tagline is very clear “Performing Excellence-Engaging Recognition”.

What do you mean by commitment management?

Too often today we, as individuals and companies, make commitments in a very casual and in some cases haphazard manner. Our thought is that if we can provide a tool that will encourage people to request, monitor and track commitments that they request and agree to, we will create a better, more dynamic work environment for everyone.

Will we have the ability to export our data?

Yes, two of our subscription plans allow you to download some or all of your data to an Excel formatted spreadsheet. As the system grows the reporting function will be enhanced and expanded.

“Peer SaaS Leaderboard and CRI”

What is the CRI?

A Credibility Reliability Index or “CRI” is a measurement that was developed as part of the PE-ER platform to establish a basis for understanding trust and focus on being trustworthy. The basic premise is, the more commitments you successfully keep the more reliable you will be and hence more trustworthy.

CRI is a score of your reliability, much as FICO is. The higher the CRI score, the more reliable the individual or company is to deliver on their commitments- the lower the score, the less reliable they are.

How is CRI calculated?

As a guideline, the Credibility Reliability Index is calculated as a combination of:

The number of commitments you met or exceeded on the timeline
The number of commitments that you missed delivery on
The total number of points available for commitments requested,
The feedback scores received on all completed commitments

Conclusion

Whether you are an executive leader of a global corporation, an entrepreneur, or a business professional, you compete in a global marketplace. The rapid deployment of mobile devices, cloud infrastructure platforms, and big data analytics technologies creates an environment that will transform the competitive landscape across whole industries. Add industry standards for capturing and measuring what has been an intangible asset and you can foresee a business world that competes on high proactive trustworthiness or Relationship Capital (RC). Outcompeting by out-behaving the competition.

The speed at which a product or service innovation can be created, sold, and implemented through these global digital channels is mind-numbing. The ability to earn and maintain trust by capturing Relationship Capital (RC) is as important as any other forms of capital (financial, intellectual, human, etc.)

Now, through the explosion of social media and other digital channels, we have entered the “Relationship Capital Economy” where establishing and building a trusted reputation or “RC” with your entire ecosystem of customers, employees, and partners are the new currency or even gold standard for distinction and success.

In this increasingly transparent business world, teams and their leaders that publicly declare and keep their commitments will achieve more of their goals with their stakeholders. How you keep your commitment is as important as the outcome itself to attract new customers, retain top performers, and any other meaningful relationship. What’s past is prologue and the relationship capital you and your team earn with your kept commitments will lead the way.