What is Your Purpose in Life, Work, and the Universe?

Actually, I'm not referring to this conference when I ask you the question, "Why are you here?" What I mean is, why are all of us here? Here on this planet? What is the reason for our existence? This may appear as too grandiose a question for a conference that's focused on talent management. However, I want to encourage you to think again. Isn't it true that all of us, at least at some point in our lives, ask the question, "Why are we here?" Don't we all search for meaning? I believe that all of us want to feel inside of our hearts that there is a reason, a purpose for us being here. Some of us find meaning in this age-old institution called family. This is true of all cultures, be they Asian, European, or American. Others find meaning in the communities we live in, in the clubs, tribes, or societies we belong to. My purpose is to help others create caring, functional communities that help each other get better over time. My journey on this quest began 16 years ago when I started my company, the Best Practice Institute. Today, we have over 42,000 subscribers from around the globe of individuals just like you who are transforming their organizations through best and next methods of organization change. Here we are at the New York Stock Exchange. We bring together peers who are part of various organizations who create strategic alliances that have done things like reduce major pandemics across the globe and introduce new innovative technologies into emerging markets. Here we are at the Pentagon. We're helping with a major issue right now at the Pentagon with transitioning veterans to the civilian sector. Currently we're also helping the United Nations in their global compact. I strongly believe that we are on the verge of a new era. The way we work, the way we live our adult lives is changing dramatically. Now, while it's true that this process of changing the way we work is at different stages in different countries, it surely is not a Western thing anymore. Maybe it has to do more with industries than countries. Nowadays, software goes into all kinds of products, from the fridge in your kitchen to the cars and to your PlayStations for your kids. So the war for talent over software engineers is in full swing in Asia and Europe and America, it's everywhere. Many of today's greatest talents are in fact looking to find a way to make a dent in the universe, like Steve Jobs used to say. Today more and more the finest talents start not by asking how much or what, they start by asking what's my purpose? Purpose. After ruminating on what's my purpose, I had an epiphany. I found there's 3 core elements to a powerful purpose in an organization that produces results: purpose, process, and practice. Here it is. Say, for example, a drill company. The practice is they make drills. The process is they use the most incredible total quality management process to make the greatest drills on Earth. But the purpose— is it to drill holes in the wall? No, it's to hang pictures of your loved ones on the wall. First, the purpose. Employers must start by asking, "Why are we doing what we are doing?" They must infuse a sense of meaning into what they do as an organization. I like to think of this as a revolution, perhaps as significant as the IT revolution. Much like technology a few decades ago, purpose has become a business imperative. In today's world, running an organizational intention without purpose is self-defeating for stakeholders. There are different catchy phrases for this to describe the idea. Purpose Economy or Caring Means Sharing. And marketing guru Seth Godin calls it the connection revolution. Today it's all about humans connecting with each other. They interact through generosity and their ability to connect, like we began to do in our peer networking break. Who wants to make purpose happen in this room now? Raise your hand. We have one person, two people. All right, some people don't want to. Anybody else want to make purpose? Vote by yelling. All right, we can do better than that today. It's the beginning of this conference. Give us more. From the gut, do we all want to make purpose? All right, now I heard that. Okay, it's a great, great crowd. All right, good. The ability to connect is where the art lies. It's what makes your brand remarkable. Makes it stand out. To achieve this, you need an enabling culture. The process. This is how you connect and enable your culture. At BPI, we share purpose in a safe and caring community. We do this first by creating agreement on our non-attribution and non-disclosure rule. The second process we use is feed forward. Instead of feedback, try feed forward. When I change, I connect with you and you tell me how I can get better. Then I'm going to want to get better. French philosophers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he wrote a book called The Social Contract. Anyone know? Social Contract. It helped establish collaborative relationships during the French Revolution. Social contracts are formed between individuals to follow up and help each other get better throughout the year. The key is follow-up and making agreements about how you help each other through a social contract. This is what a social contract looks like at BPI. Feel free to use it. Practice. What will I do to help you achieve your quarterly and yearly challenges? We do things on a 3, 6, 9, 12-month process for a reason I'll share with you in just a moment. Time. When will I follow up with you? An agreement to follow up. Get your Google Calendar out now. Get your calendar out now, whatever it may be. Let's look at a time. What can we agree on? Let's do it. We will agree to meet and talk at this time to follow up on this specific item. Expectations. What is expected of me? Are you asking me to give you advice on a particular area? That you need to focus on, your competency that you need to improve upon, or do you want me to help you get a strategic relationship or enable you to have a meeting with the CEO or enable you to get a specific strategic alliance from outside the organizations? We use a tool for this that shows and uses advice and appreciation and mini-review. We all know that there is a significant debate right now on performance management. To performance management or do performance appraisal or not to do performance appraisal. Who here is dealing with this debate right now? Yeah, Liberty Mutual. Ma'am, where are you from? Ricola. Ricola. Yeah, okay. So two organizations are dealing with this debate. So this brings together mini-reviews, just a few skills, and the appreciation which gives the release of oxytocin in the brain which makes you feel good and enables you to have less cortisol. So appreciation, review, advice, that's what this tool does. It's used at Becton Dickinson to show real change. It shows the ROI. You can check it out, SkillRater. This is why the purpose of why I'm showing this to you today is because I'm giving you all free memberships to Best Practice Institute and to utilize SkillRater here today. So use it, connect it, follow up, develop with it. It's yours to keep. You can do it, sir. You can actually use it. So it's— and it's easy to set up. We can put skills on it. We have skills on it. You will have your own group. For here in Singapore. Great stuff. This is the cross-section of the human brain with purpose, process, and practice. It's kind of fun and kind of gross at the same time. Put your head in— down the middle, you'll have two parts. You have an amygdala, which is an almond-sized shape organ in your brain, and the prefrontal or neocortex. This neocortex in the front of your brain makes rational decisions. This amygdala in your brain talks about the emotions. If that amygdala gets stimulated, the prefrontal cortex doesn't want to do anything. It gets mad at you. So purpose is the emotion. It's what is the brand— feeling younger, children, fun, etc. Process is what makes it happen. Practice is what the actual product is. Prefrontal cortex makes the product, amygdala Creates the purpose, relates to your talent programs. Let's get to some case examples. What do you do to better predict actions and behaviors of others? The practice is all about social interaction and happiness. So let's take two case examples. Let's look at Kimberly-Clark and Becton Dickinson. First, Kimberly-Clark. The purpose at Kimberly-Clark is to provide the essentials for a better life by providing the little things that make lives better. Its purpose for employees is to unleash their power and achieve the fullest potential for its culturally diverse workforce, both women and male leaders. Women and male leaders. That's what we say. Now, they have a culture of accountability to unleash their power This is what it looks like. It's around diversity, workforce, building trust, making decisions, think the customer, continuously improve, build talent. This purpose has been pervasive throughout Kimberly-Clark. And they made— in order to meet the unique needs of the market in China, they had to they had to connect that internal brand with their external brand. And the external brand was being portrayed differently than the internal brand in the market. Women in China had a statement that they brought out in focus groups. A successful woman is not necessarily a happy woman. Women were staying at work 14-hour days. They couldn't get to their homes at night. They were talking to their children on WeChat and Skype. This kind of— it had to change. And think of the incredible amount of discourse that happens in a person's life when you keep them from their children. Instead, the grandparents would be taking care of— of women and of their women's children in single-family households. Wasn't right. And Naomi Montanaro, who will be speaking in Hong Kong, knew something needed to happen. This external brand where mothers were helped didn't work within the internal brand. So Naomi said, the good thing about working at Kimberly-Clark is that something that is discovered as a requirement for change can be acted upon with speed. Speed and agility. By the way, she really said, "When it happens on Monday, it can change on a Tuesday." So, that's pretty fast. That's agile change. So, she did that. Here's what she did. She instituted flexible working hours for women. She made it quickly and swiftly. She increased morale engagement and alleviated stress in women employees in China. And it happened in 2 days. Now, if this kind of small transactional change can happen with one person, what can you do to go against the grain in your organization tomorrow or maybe after this break?