Good work: forging a model for a mission based business through professional mastery

This paper gives an account of one person’s journey towards achieving the level of professional mastery needed to execute important and useful work. The journey took the doctoral candidate through investigations into the meaning of place, followed by further research into special places facilitated by a series of symposiums in regional Australia and America. The insights into place, and the human role in creating and sustaining them, then led the candidate, quite unexpectedly, to the field of natural landscape restoration and the development of a mission based business that delivers highly effective solutions to degraded land. These travels have resulted in: (1) the articulation of the Special Places that Prosper factors, which provides guidance in community capacity building. (2) A significant shift in the mind set of land repair by addressing system function before system management. (3) A business design process that goes beyond traditional business modeling and offers a road map for future 'sustainable' start up businesses to follow. (4) A Mission based Business Design that provides a blueprint for effective and ethical business-to-business service delivery in contentious and highly debated business environments. The open nature of work based learning and practice based research made this journey possible and was the key factor in encouraging the exploration of place, the design innovation and in testing the veracity of the candidate’s theories about professional mastery, community capacity building and business modeling in a real world environment. Navigating the academic, as well as the everyday business expectations of a work based doctorate did prove challenging. However, all of these factors made it possible to take the knowledge creation process to its most desirable zenith – more than just a contribution to professional knowledge and practice but to an understanding and improving of self in order to use increased professional mastery to contribute to good work.