34 | Exploring the power of an organisation's purpose
23 Dec 2019 · 48 min
In this episode of the "Inspiring Change" podcast, host Scott McInnes leads a multi‑speaker panel that delves into why purpose matters for organisations and how it can be made tangible for employees. The discussion weaves personal anecdotes, philosophical reflections, and concrete case studies (Google’s mission‑driven innovation, Disney’s hands‑on leadership, Special Olympics inclusion, gender‑pay equity initiatives, and the ikigai model). Panelists argue that purpose must be authentic, linked to individual motivations, and continuously communicated through frontline stories, celebration of micro‑wins, and iterative dialogue. They warn against tokenistic or one‑off activities, stress the need for leaders to embody purpose, and highlight practical tactics such as front‑line obsession, 20 % projects, repetition of the purpose statement, and aligning purpose with business outcomes. The episode concludes with a call to keep purpose simple, inclusive, and embedded in everyday work.
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I think it's very hard to translate what she talks about, but that's a whole other point. I did learn French in school, and the phrase "can't deny the raison d'être," that actually, for me, sums up reason for being. And I thought it would be a nice way to think about the organization on a personal level, because I like to think of it as a person. I like a lot of what was said in the back of the room around the idea that if you can connect the two, then you really are going to win. I've worked in the past in various workshops in corporates, and I have had people leave the organizations, not to knock on our doors, not because it was a terrible session, I hope, but because they realized that that disconnect was there. That disconnect was already there, which was seen in the city experience. Very serious conversation to say, well, am I really in the right place? Or when I think about what I'm really looking for from life, should I be somewhere else? And one of the things that I learned very early on as a good point is that people— you don't motivate people, people motivate themselves. And that's always stuck with me ever since I heard that about 15 years ago, so I think it comes right back to this discussion this morning.
Thank you. Something that you said earlier, I think it's just a step forward, was asking the most powerful question that we can ask, which is why. So you get so caught up in the day-to-day of all about what you're going to deliver and how you're going to deliver it. I think probably everybody has sat through presentations from colleagues or strategies from colleagues that are just bogged down in operational detail on what you're going to To do. you about how you're going to do it. But really it's all meaningless, it's all blah blah blah unless we're answering the question of why. And it really gets to the heart of our motivation. Books inspire us, that's what keeps us going. Why are we doing what we're doing? If you think about it, art, philosophy, religion, all of those great emotional inspiring statements of human culture are based on asking why. And so if as organizations we can think through why are we doing what we're doing, I mean, it's a little bit bigger than just I'm turning up to get a paycheck. It's a little bit more inspiring, it's broader, it's about society, it's about the good of the whole organization, the good of the people around you, your customers and so on. That's the one that really every new hire should answer prior. So one simple question, which is what are they promising to have, and explaining why each and every time for me. Okay, thanks. So there's the A lot of what was said resonated with me, and Pedro, it very much also resonates with me. You talk about, you know, when you've done a really long day, and then what do you do for something extra? I guess when I think about purpose, it's the engine for me. It's what keeps me going. It's the fueling up the fire. And for me, it's very linked to being on of myself. So if I can't be myself, if I'm not authentic, and if I'm not feeling it, and I'm very much a, you know, empathic, I'm very much an emotional intelligence, so I've got to feel the purpose for myself and the organizational purpose, and if they interweave and are one, then, you know, it's the secret sauce, it's the magic, yeah. And therefore, I feel like he better I can do that extra bit. I'm gonna have to, you know, drive an engine even for one of those. So it's a combination of all of those things that, you know. And so for me, I think it's absolutely the time of the pipeline. I think that's incredibly important. One of the things I think that— what I heard Scott McInnes say also, like, there's been two transformations in the 3.5 years. I think we're taking these big leaps 20-year-old company where the opposite of market leadership was, you know, Asian American girls, that kind of thing. People were not used to competition. They were not used to a vision. So we spent a lot of time thinking, "Which, beyond just learning, will actually change people's lives? Will make better leaders, better husbands, better wives, better parents like the content that we're sharing?" One of the things we— we had a very clear purpose around the end user. Very, very clear purpose. And one of the things we wasted a lot of time on was there was what we call the "love people" who were on the bus from the get-go. They were like, "I believe in this purpose. I am going to do whatever it takes to make this purpose happen." And then there was a lot of people who decided to step down so they actually know how it was working working for a 22-year-old company that felt like this kind of service, and I was very comfortable in her style of working on the job. We wasted a lot of time on the people who wouldn't get off the bus, who wouldn't get off the bus, instead of giving the people who would, said, "I'm ready to listen to this new belief and purpose." And we actually spent a lot of time trying to convince people to get off the bus, and that was one of the big mistakes we made. We actually should have spent 18 months spend too much time loving and caring at the office with people around the bus instead of trying to get it done. So I think, I actually think if you're not aligned to your company's purpose, it's hard doing 40 hours a week. It's really hard doing 60 hours a week. That's too hard. So that's it for me. Correct. Yeah. Correct. Yeah, and I think we had— so obviously, Trill's actually born and reared in the UK like me, and we were like, gosh, we don't— you know, I'm all about authenticity, I'm all about, you know, speaking the truth and all that kind of stuff, and that was just not the way things were coming out. That was a good thing. They asked not much from a lot of people, but you know, then we saw there was people in there who just were like bonds that became incredibly deep. How they were amazing at bringing their teams with them. And then other people who had been really established leaders didn't happen at all. They wouldn't because they were— they had a purpose that was no longer for our culture.
Is this just this whole prophecy future stuff? Is it the new event, the new news?
Is it just the new black?
Is it something that's gonna come and go? That's not what we're looking at right now.
From a forensic perspective, from a legal perspective, where could you see that coming?
Is it going to come and go? Is it just the new black?
I don't know. I believe in the fact that the need for purpose has been right the way through human civilization. As I said earlier, if you think about art, philosophy, religion, it's always asking why. So you can actually flip the question and say, why has it taken until now for companies or organizations to think through purpose and get purpose in? And I think one of the answers is also the answer to the question For me is that there is so much choice for consumers and for workers, individuals. Always, in a sense, the proliferation of information. So with the internet, you have a supercomputer in your pocket right now that is more powerful than the computer that sent that to me. And you have endless choice. So as a consumer, you don't just have to buy the two brands that your local store stocks. You could buy anything as a worker, professional. You don't just have to sign up to a company and work there for 40 years. You could look for other opportunities any minute of any day and you could switch. And so with this choice, it becomes even more work for organizations to be able to persuade people beyond the statistical benefits that there is a reason why people should choose them, that there's a reason why you should stay here as a professional. There's a reason why you should choose this product as a consumer. And so I think why that has been here to stay for much human civilization, but now it's evolved more for organizations because of the amount of choice that we all have. And I'm going to ask you to Google— I think Google set up in 1998 the Big Orange Brain, um, the orange sort of egg where Stanford graduates ranked They started with a mission. So it wasn't something that was retroactively fitted on afterwards. They said in their garret with their little computers, they said, "Oh, it would be nice if we could organize the world's information and make the universe accessible and useful." And that has been the purpose or the mission ever since. And it started with Google Search, which has been a complete success. 5.6 billion searches per day. And we're all so used to it that we don't really stop and think about it all that much. But the internet revolution meant that in the past your access to information was determined by how much wealth you had. So it was determined by whether your parents had a library of books, whether you lived near a decent library, what university or school you went to. Whereas now, if you have an internet connection, it doesn't matter whether you're in Nigeria whether you read on an iPhone, a computer, or Cortana, you have the same access to the world's information. But I think a lot of people are trying to keep the university in an organizational model. It started with the search, and then the whole team around— sorry, I keep explaining that. I just apologize to the department buildings. The whole team around them was thinking through how do we organize the world's information and make the university accessible and useful. And so there was the thought, "Jeez, why didn't we build us an app suite next? Can't we do just an on-the-side project and try and figure out how to make email better?" And Gmail was born because of that. It now has a billion users. Somebody else said, "Of course information isn't just websites, you know, just online. We've got all the information that's offline." And so they decided to try and map all of the streets and locations in the world and the easiest way to navigate so that no The Blind has 9 consumer products with a billion users each, and that is all coming from folks in a range of different professions around a single mission that was written in the foundation's mandate: making people's information accessible and useful. So I think that's a great example of how your mission can be defined, yet everybody who joins the organization is on board with it. That's why they're quiet. That's why they're quiet. It's about the innovation that comes from We have a— they're called 20% projects. Anybody can say to their manager, "Hey, I've got this idea for a 20% project. Can I go pursue this?" So that's a kind of famous concept. I mean, it actually exists. But I think the point behind that is that if you can get everybody on board with the mission and purpose of the team, then you no longer need to be talking to 100 people straight every month, every Saturday, or each month. We have probably a task list that says you need to do all of these things and you need to be in at 9 and you don't leave until 6. All of that prescriptive, directive stuff could go away because if everything is motivated by the same mission and you've hired smart, motivated people, then you can free up people to be creative and innovative and pursue that mission. And it's really— it is a great illustration of how well people work that many of our end user products work. on personal time to help people. A reasonable management response might be, in a classic sense, to say, well, I reckon it would be impossible for starters, and indeed, that's not even on the table as a kind of big money. There was no monetization model whatsoever for apps at the point that somebody came up with that incredible idea. And in fact, strictly speaking, there still is no monetization model for But because we believed in the vision, we were willing to say, you know what, that would be incredible for people, and it would help make the world's education more accessible and useful. So let's go with that and see what happens. So it does take a certain level of bravery and risk-taking to go, yeah, I'm truly going to pursue the vision at all levels. We're about 480,000 people in 87 countries, so it's pretty chunky. And it's like trying to turn the Titanic, if you want to make a debate for change, and that's it for the transformations as well. For us as an organization, I have to come back to kind of the core of the question. But for us, when our organization was founded in 1966, so we're Generation X as an organization, we were built on the foundation And the company was still alive and still came over into our office at Paris in the '80s at Peter's age. And it often drew very simple things, the spirit of progress, the spirit of purpose, the spirit of people. And that still is very much the sort of core of what we're about. And it's very interesting as an organization to kind of come about. And for him, the reason that that actually came about was that he had He'd been, as a young Frenchman, he'd been a soldier in the war and he'd come sort of back into industry, into a factory business, and he'd seen that, you know, how shareholders and how money was made needed to have more than just sort of delivering shareholder value. And so he created a growth organization and that growth organization is all about delivering opportunities for people. That is kind of how we get our purpose and our organization sustained. You know, so if for instance like the NASA example, if someone is cleaning a floor, if they're providing services in a prison, they're out in Dubai somewhere, they're in, you know, they're looking after the army somewhere out in the world, they're on an oil rig, these are the kind of things that people do, are cleaning up after horses, looking after elephants, or whatever it is. Trying to connect with them the purpose of why they do that and what the end game is for the people that they do it for. So we connect them with the, with the concept of our organization, what it is doing. But also getting our leaders to understand that it is a corporate organization. I'll give you an example of something that used to make me sort of stay very awake and very engaged in this was I thought about the fact that when I ran the business, there were We had 4,000 employees. Every one of those employees, give or take, had a family. So, you know, that was— if I just took the average, most people had 2 or 3 people in their family. That's at least 12,000 people whose lives, whose education, whose future ambitions, and where they were going to work depended on decisions that we as a team made. So when I would talk with my team, I always said, you know, is this organization We should engage in? Is this a decision we should make? Do we invest in that? Is that the right thing to do? You know, we're doing pretty well. The profits are pretty good. We can further invest, but if we do this, is that risky? What does it mean? So connecting back every time what the purpose is and trying to think about the people who do the day-to-day work in our business. Am I going to affect them? Am I going to put them at risk? This thing is complex. They do put their jobs at risk. So how do you get that in a smaller company, in a startup where that hasn't been there? I think it's talked about a lot about moving away from just that shareholder value of delivering an end result. How do we sustain it? You need to get back to that. Why are we doing it? How do we keep the people involved? Because no matter how nice this conversation is going, I'm totally attuned to it. We all have ups and downs in our energy for things. So we've got to keep, you know, my purpose at the moment, I've got 80,000 people in my country I'm making food and food for everybody. So it's been happening to us. It's ups and downs, and you've got to be able to find the pension with it. And keep at the craft, you know, something that's very important. So we've probably got about an hour. anything else, they have better be doing that and maintaining that and amplifying it. So, you know, whatever the job is, we're trying to get people to think about good effects of very basic home care. So if people are going into somebody's home, and I've experienced it myself, you know, with my parents at the time, and you're having comfort givers, which is a company, we're their home company, and you're actually saying, what does it feel like with care. And if you're the son or daughter of a parent, you know, you can understand that, you know, where my parents are going to get fed, what they're going to get their drugs, is one of them falling down, is somebody broken, is somebody going home after 50 minutes, what actually happens to them. So line managers were always trying to, you know, make sure that line managers get that, that they're told making sure that they understand and that they take away the obstacles from people doing their— the obstacles that are stopping them delivering that. That's their purpose in this as well. So trying to simplify the process. I think I heard a little bit about it again earlier on. I think my partner says enough that simplicity is expensive. So trying to get to simplicity, trying to get to the core of things. There is a big lot of complexity to get there. But if it's a calm discussion and it's something we're really trying to uplift, then it can be simple. But, you know, it's not perfect. And what we found is that there's a great story about him. So when Disney— when he was talking about Disney, when Disney was first— when the Disney Park was opening in California, there was a pretty much a house full behind from a time and a budget perspective. And they were all behind in terms of their Olympic needs. And he had 14 months to get it back on track. And the night before, they were kicked out of the hotel. The park, and there was an area in front of the hotel that had no saws on it. The saws had been delivered, but they hadn't made it. And he called back— so everybody, you know, I just got home from work, 14 months straight, 88 weeks, got home to get ready for the big opening in the morning. He calls the whole back and senior leadership team and says, we're gonna make the saws. Because there's nobody else to judge, okay? And they're all going, "What now? I got to reverse the car? How do I do it?" And somebody else, I can't remember who it was, thought before I turned around to judge, and he said, "Green side up." And that became, in Disney, that is everything to do with leadership is green side up, in that you get your hands just as dirty as everybody else and you're prepared to get it dirty. And that was the big thing. We traveled the roads, we talked to everybody, I went out and got emails from every corner of the globe every single day. We got a lot of people coming to me going, "I'm just not sure if this is—" and I was the primary piece of a lot of the new strategy. "I'm not sure if this is for me." And I was kind of like, "I don't know, it may not be. Let's have a conversation about that." And that's a really hard conversation to have. And I think this was the point. Company that there was a rule that you had to reply to email within 8 hours or you could get fired. There was a rule that, like, there was all these bizarre rules that I would only figure out like months later because I would be told, "Why is everybody yelling about things?" And it's like, "That's scary." And so I think it is— you have to embody that. If you are paying it lip service, nobody's gonna believe you. And if you have that ability to walk into a room and say, "Lads, I completely believe in what we're doing. End users are changing their lives because of the training we're giving them. And leaders are getting better. We're training the software developers of tomorrow because of what we're doing. We are changing people's lives and we're making the world better. And if you don't believe in that, that's fine. We are not that company." That's not— we're gonna go with very different type of tech company and all that, so we all have to embody everything single. And like, culture is what happens when you're not there. Real culture. And I think that's the same purpose for you. You have to make sure that you trust people to do what you need them to do. I go to Oscars, you know? Sure. How do you make sure that when an organization fails, you don't lose sight of your purpose, that you bring it back and make sure that actually you do stay relevant? Let's see, how do you keep the organization moving in the direction of the purpose when people around you, they say, "Look, how can we save you, actually?" And you just don't inspire them? Sure. Two things. First, I think you have to— fewer mistakes. So when things go horribly wrong, like basically there's a mistake, then you have to come out and come out and say, yeah, that wasn't in line with what we believe, wasn't in line with our values, and we're going to fix it. And you have to drastically fix it. That happens all the time at Google, as you guys will know from the headlines, because it's a huge company and we're working with very huge technology. And so things will go wrong. There will be content partly too, that we didn't want to be on YouTube, but you have to own it, but fix it, and get on with things. And you're right that the size of the organization— I can't just— all of the examples that I described earlier were very much about engineering new amazing products. But think about the team that I run, which is the team that sells advertising on the brand itself. And you might be thinking, well, how do they connect with this lofty engineering-oriented people want information universally accessible and useful. And that's something that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, and for me the answer is two problems. And hopefully this gives you an illustration of trying to break down a lofty mission that people on the front line might feel like we're running from. Firstly, I reiterate to my team all the time that if it weren't for the advertising revenue that they bring in, none of the free consumer products would exist. So they are funding all of that, that's number one. Number two, I talked about all of my— their own mission, which is to help businesses develop online and thrive, to help businesses make their information accessible and useful. And so the more that you can take examples from the front line and celebrate them, the more it becomes real. So I'll give you an example. We have a company companies, leaving us the entire time saying, "Oh my God, I'm helping you get everything together online. I'm now reaching people across the globe. I'm now hiring more people. I'm expanding my premises." And so those are the stories that we celebrate every week. At the end of our full team meeting, we bring forward the most amazing wins that anybody on the sales team has had that week that illustrates that mission or purpose of helping companies get better information That's quite useful so you take something like Emma Flannery's fragrance store of it that I said into a super traditional business we helped them get online they're now exporting to 63 countries around the world and they hired 10 more people off the back of the advertising they were doing those little ways—those micro-moments where when I can celebrate with the team the moments when they brought their purpose or mission to life I think it's highlighting you set the tone as a leader, you bring the weather as a leader, and it's celebrating all the micro-moments where frontline people live the purpose, that you keep illustrating on a day-to-day basis what that purpose means. Because as so many people have said earlier, you can't just leave the CEO's presentation, or your team will be full of cynicism. It needs to feel like something that they are living and breathing and doing every day.
And our tip we talked about, just gaining momentum, is actually sticking to the message. We'll go back and say, right, where did it go wrong and how can we do some clever education, training, leadership development and really weave those messages back inside in a way that is relevant for people. It's not the talk this morning that hasn't come up this morning as relevant.
I think sometimes the stuff can feel a bit obtuse and vague.
Pretty bad for people. How are you going to do that every day?
How are you going to do that with your team?
And again, just, you know, you think it would be so self-evident, obviously Special Olympics, it's not. I can tell you, Scott McInnes, I can give you many stories of people in Special Olympics not being inclusive. It's embarrassing, but that is exactly what happens from time to time with these people playing Like if you imagine we're a board meeting near the school in front. Every one of the countries who are supposed to have a person with intellectual disability as board member, but they skip time to get back to the company, broken a stick, so they're literally there but might as well not be there to be honest, might as well be parked in the corner of the room. So, you know, people are not thinking about how they adapt to change. So, how do we get education from the work? Beginning next week is to try and change that mindset and say, what are the adaptations that I can make as a person with mild intellectual disability that will go down that road towards people with intellectual disabilities and get the best for all of them? And that creates a lot of externalities. So it is a very deliberate way to say, as we've changed from, you know, talking about support to talking about inclusion, It's everybody else. It's everybody in this room. How can we all be inclusive leaders? So it's a deliberate play to anyone who's working on diversity and inclusion and corporate friends out there to say this is a group that nobody thinks about. They become irrelevant to you and they can bring skills that you may not already have on your team because of the way they think differently. So there's lots of things that can be done through education and training. I think would be a highly qualified that you may have started on a certain road, but that what you may realize, you need to tweak it and change it, just as we're doing now. Because you realize that maybe there's things you were hoping for are not really taking form in this world.
I don't know.
I don't really know. I don't really understand what you're talking about, to be honest with you. So, I'm just gonna walk. I'm just gonna walk.
I don't know what to do with this.
I don't know what to do with this.
Thank you. Thank you, first of all. I received something which kind of had a fascination for most of my life. When I did a master's, which was actually in English, it was not purpose-built so much, but I came across a Japanese model called ikigai, which is a four-section model of all purposes, which is do something you love, do something you're skilled at, do something you have paid for, right? What the world needs. And that's the last one that really hits me is that sometimes I used to think it was by doing something you love. And it's just that sometimes when you realize that it's about this idea, what does the world need? It's about, I suppose, from an organizational point of view, do you see how that could apply for you as an organization? So I think working for a point about purposes is what we're looking at today so much more so. Yeah, I mean, for me, my kind of big thing at ScaleSoft was creating women leaders. And so I'm not going to continue to reiterate, you know, gender pay gap, etc., etc. I mean, the more depressing statistic is that most people think it's fixed, right? So one of the really, really big things that we did an awful lot of work on is we gave free training to We found girls who code, lots of girl coding organizations from an IT perspective. But we also developed a very specific, um, leadership courseware, which was actually— and again, I'm one of those people who, you know, I don't like sitting in locker rooms talking to women and thinking about how we can support each other. It's great, but as a man, I generally forget about this, right? Because it's very easy to not remember That's where the decisions are being made. Therefore, you have to figure out how to either advocate for that group or get a sponsor in that group who's going to talk on your behalf. So I always say this, I said this to Scott many times, we're not mentored to death, we are mentored. It's like, you know, it's like a dog food puppy. What you need is someone who's going to freaking talk about you when you're not in the room because you're not going to be there. So I actually I think that is, you know, what you're coming to from a non-native perspective, because with them, everybody kind of had the take-over to go ahead and do whatever they wanted. That once was a charity. I think that's really important. I think that's very personal though too. I hope I'm here because again, it's all about one's leadership, especially the girls' side. With our teenage girls, when girls come to us, come to Scott McInnes, they get 42% from what they're saying. So I think we need to go find the kind of resilience that Scott McInnes has. And I actually think that's what 4-H needs. I think that's very personal. I know, for example, I think this girl We donate a lot of our leadership training to the Special Olympics because we believe inclusion and diversity is incredibly important. And again, when I joined, the week before, the management team were all white men who had been there for 14 years. So you can't really go out every day talking about diversity and inclusion when you're talking about meeting with them. So I think that's really important. I think it gives There are other ways than freedom to do something with their time or money. And I also think the company is allowing us to be kind, that if whatever your purpose is, you will find something for that. That's my take. Yeah, I can no disagree with that. I think Tara's point back to do something you love and having, you know, the four quadrants, I think it's incredibly important. Important in articulation in organizations as leaders, but you also find ways to make, you know, the day-to-day stuff, the part that's the hard part, understood that what it delivers, and what it delivers actually hopefully allows the growth, the profitability, and the bottom line to do a lot more of the things you love. So I try to think of it as being very circular, you know, if you want to— it's like As an example, we have hundreds of ERGs around the world, 5 research groups that come from different companies, and they all want me to do different things. You know, it's always, always about the amount, you know. We need to engage people in doing what we do and delivering our bottom line so we can invest in that and invest in our talent and our people. Again, it can be very cynical, but, you know, everything is about We were talking about the role models, people who are growing. If we're going to do, for instance, our big, audacious goal, one of them yesterday, is to get gender pay equity in 80-something countries. And if we're going to do that, then we're going to have to do some very difficult things. But if that's the lofty goal, then we're going to have to get people to deliver the right bottom lines and to get balance in between. And on the right hands as well. So we need to listen to the people that are in our management level. You need to show them and help them to understand and feel it. What I probably go back to what I said very much at the beginning is if people are not feeling it, if there's kind of something in there for them, and if they walk out of the room and do something different, then I think the whole objective is failing. Because if a lot of conversations The coffee conversation when they go to the side is Senegal, Boston. So the engagement, the involvement, if you're going back to the last question around failure, you've got to go back and ask people, you've got to involve them, you've got to get their, you know, their input as to the how and listen and be integrating that into the discussions as well. So I think the recommendations that I would like to build on.
You just made a really great point, like what Mark was saying, and I'm just thinking of what Tara and someone else brought up earlier. Just from a nonprofit perspective, just to give a perspective on things like the charity day, there should be given a note of caution, because I don't have any more time today. Coming back to the ideas of connection and relevance, it can become tokenistic. I've seen that happening where it sort of becomes a bit random and the employees who turn up aren't quite sure why they're there. The biggest thing I'd say is it can be a one-off for that employee, and I don't believe it really has the deep effect that you might hope it's having doing it. So I would encourage you to think about connection relevance to the purpose that's online and sustainable, something that will target You know, the philanthropic or optimal skills often in relation to academic specialisation, but it is fantastic because it has been ongoing and it has been meaningful. So I think really questioning if the things you're doing, like those one-off days, are really meaningful for those employees that you're engaging, but also for the organisation that you're engaging with, because I venture to guess that If you really ask them honestly, sometimes those things are a lot of time and effort to organize and don't really have a long-term impact on the organization you're trying to help.
So I have to be a little bit cautious with that. Anybody to take it up with Scott? So I will bring it back to the background. Obviously, I agree completely with you on that. What is replacement-based? If you think about the human race, we don't live in isolation, we don't live on our own. We're not off Lone Rangers in the forest, wildcats. We like to live in packs. So just on a completely biological, psychological level, there's part of our brain that says, "Go off and be selfish, compete for yourself, look after yourself, sustain your own body and your kids." there's another part of our brain that says, actually, your kids can't live in a foreign society, they have to be suspended from society already to live this way. They don't even see it as a platform for society as a whole. So, on purpose, I'm not going to say they're practical. I would bring it back to that. If you keep in mind the why, people are going to have to motivate it on their self-esteem, on what's good for me day to day, in my job, or with friends. But the other one is going to be this part, really, that's saying, is this good? Is this sustaining society as a whole? Is this good for everybody? Is this good for the wider team, company, pack, society? And so I think that's powerful. I choose to incorporate that point of what's good for the world, because honestly, yourself, like, motivation in a job, right? Am I getting a promotion? Am I getting a pay raise? Is everybody going to be happy about me? I mean, you don't really look at it from that perspective.— it's absolutely key to adhere to your contract when you join the company for your selfish purposes. I think purpose should incorporate generally what the major mission for your day-to-day work is helping support or society alongside you. And so what looks like a counterbalance to your selfish instincts in the day-to-day has been able to come back to, but how long will that purpose— so I think your point is really important. Where you make that into its own powerful thing that can be edited to become these more purposes, as opposed to the purpose being one thing and then simultaneously we're doing something else, being mean or giving somebody to charity or running an event.
And for me, when you think about that, Scott's thoughts especially, Scott, when you think about how many people are just out there, I hope they don't have to be pretty much isolated.
And she'll start to realize how people are terrified of change for all the reasons, you know, I can't get my mortgage, I'm not going to have a job, I'm not going to have my, you know, books, things. Yeah, I get very much what you're talking about with that. I think also it depends on the involved people. So once an organization has its purpose, you know, if you're going to You've spent the money, the time, and the research, and you've done all of it really well, and it's coming from all the right reasons, then you need to involve people in more back loops and things like that. As you're moving and changing and morphing, you need to keep iterating that a little bit differently. And if you do, again, you can't just push it down to people. You need to involve people in that conversation and keep your process open. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. Because repeat until you feel like everyone thinks you're an idiot. Because literally until every single person on the team can repeat back what the purpose is to you, just how do you articulate it. It's not just one line in a presentation that everybody's forgotten. So repeat it every time, every strategy, every meeting, every set of targets. Repeat how it connects back.— wants everyone to be heard, be heard by the management, only then have you got a chance of actually guiding people's decision-making to explain.
The group of Lean Markers appears in a book called "The Founder's Mentality" by Francis Crockford. One of the big themes is the front-line obsession. So that's my main advice. If you are going to make purpose stick, you have to have powerful dialogue session. That's where the real action happens. That's where the examples of people living purpose actually come from. And with that, my ex-boss actually met Desmond Mandela shortly before he died. I said, Mandela, what's the secret? What's the biggest thing you would pass on either to anyone else or to our company? He said, keep it simple.
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