Episode 34 | Power of Purpose | Panel Discussion

So we're really lucky to have some cracking panelists this morning. All C-suite execs who are living this stuff every single day of the week and trying to make a real difference in their organizations. Margot Slattery was the president of Sodexo Ireland, but she's recently been named as global diversity and inclusion officer for Sodexo. Sodexo, Sodexo. Alice Manser is Director of Customer Solutions in Google. Denis Dooley is Chief of Organizational Excellence in Special Olympics. And Tara O'Sullivan, until very recently, was Chief Marketing Officer in Skillsoft. So a real wealth and breadth of experience in the room. So what we're going to do is I've got a few questions I'm going to be asking the guys. We have this comedy mic. That I could lob into the crowd, 'cause I'm sure you guys are gonna have some questions too. So what we'll do is we'll mix it up a little bit. I'll do some questioning. Think of me as like a cross between Murray Mochalahan and Jeremy Paxman, if indeed such a hideous monster could ever exist. So I'll tell you what, let's kick off. Dennis, you're closest, so we'll kick off with you. Yeah, well done. Well, that's fine. Listen, I'm going with the gender balance here. You're the guy in the room. That mic should be on, I think. Oh, we're on. Yeah. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to ask each of you just very quickly to tell me what purpose means to you. Could be business, could be personal, but what does purpose mean to you specifically?

Thanks. Hi, everyone. When I was thinking about this coming into this morning, first of all, I think it's very hard to add much to what's been said. It's been brilliant answers all morning. But I did learn French in school, and the phrase came to mind, raison d'être, and that actually for me sums it up— reason for being. And I thought it was a really nice way to think about both at the organizational level and at the personal level, because I like a lot of what was said at the back of the room around the idea that if you can connect the two, then you're really on a winner. And I have worked in the past doing values workshops in corporates, and I have had people leave the organizations not too long afterwards, not because it was a terrible session, I hope, but because they realized that that disconnect was there. So I really like what you're saying at this table here. It's a 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? One of the things I learned very early on— my last quick point— is that people— you don't motivate people, people motivate themselves. And that's always stuck with me. I first heard that about 15 years ago, so I think it comes right back to this discussion this morning. So those are my quick thoughts.

Thank you. Somebody mentioned this earlier, but for me it's just as simple as asking the most powerful question that we can ask, which is why. So you can get so caught up in the day-to-day that it's all about what you're gonna deliver, how you're gonna 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 gonna do and how you're gonna 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. We're most inspired when we're thinking through why we're doing what we're doing. If you think about it, art, philosophy, religion, all of those great emotional inspiring things in human culture are based on asking why. And so if as organizations we can think through why are we doing what we're doing, and 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 societal good, the good of the whole organization, the good of the people around you, your customers and and so on, that's the moment when you get really charged up and inspired. So one simple question is just all about pausing to ask and explain why each and every time for me.

Okay, thanks. So I guess for me, a couple of things, and a lot of what was said earlier on very much resonated with me. And Pedro, I very much also resonate when you talk about, you know, when you've done a really long day and then why do you do the 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 and the fire. And for me, it's very linked to being all 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, the empathics, I'm very much into emotional intelligence. So I've got to feel the purpose. For myself and then 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, a little like you, Pedro, I can do that extra bit. And, you know, I drive that engine even further. So it's a combination of all of those. Hope that makes sense.

Yeah, great.

Thank you.

And so for me, I think it's absolutely the Simon Sinek why. I think that's incredibly important, but one of the things I think that when I was at Skillsoft, we did like 2 transformations in 3 and a half years, and you were taking basically a 20-year-old company where the absolute market leader by, you know, 800-pound gorilla kind of thing. People were not used to competition, they were not used to pitching a vision, so we spent a lot of time thinking about we don't just sell learning, we actually change people's lives. We make them better leaders, better, husbands, better wives, better parents by the content that we're doing. And one of the things we, so we had a very clear purpose around the end user, very, very clear purpose. And one of the things we wasted a shed load of time on was there was, we call them, there was a load of 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 load of people who self-selected and said, actually, no, I was working for a 20-year-old company that felt like the civil service and I was very comfortable there, so I'm gonna go off and get another job. We wasted a load of time on the people who had one foot on the bus and one foot off the bus. Instead of giving the people who had said, "I pledge allegiance to this new purpose," we actually spent a load of time trying to convince people to get on the bus. And that was one of the big mistakes we made. We actually should have spent a huge amount of time loving and caring and being authentic with the people who are on the bus. Instead of trying to convince. 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 if that's what's required. So that's, that's it for me.

And there's definitely a piece around, for me, that whole idea of getting those early adopters, the ones that are the ones that are on the bus, and using them— yes, back to a point that was made here— to inspire the new blood, to inspire those kind of late adopters and the laggards and all those people at the other end of the change curve to bring them on the journey as well.

Yeah, and I think we had a— so obviously Skillsoft had brought in a lot of new people like me, and a lot of people 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 done in there. So that was a bit of a what the eff moment for a lot of people. But, you know, then we saw there was people in there who just grew like vines out of it. They became incredible leaders and they were amazing at bringing their teams with them. And then other people who had been really established leaders couldn't hack it at all. They wouldn't because they were— they had a purpose that was no longer our go-forward purpose.

And for me, having those— if those early adopters are all the happy bouncy bunnies that are all amazing in the organization, I think that can kind of partly undermine it. I think there's real power. And if you get some of those cynics, the ones that were like, "Oh, whatever all this stuff is," if you can win those over and use them as your ambassadors, that's really powerful.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Dennis, let me come back to you, because just something that Tara mentioned there, we change people's lives.

When—

it might be worthwhile actually just taking just maybe a minute just to tell everyone about Special Olympics and what you do. But for me, I think when you work in a charity and do what Special Olympics does, it's easy for everyone to see their purpose, right? Because what they're doing is amazing work for people with intellectual disabilities. So that's where I'm coming from. It must be an amazing place to work because everyone can see that North Star, to someone's point over here. And they all know exactly what they're doing. And they're going to go there because they're passionate and believe. Isn't that the case?

Yes and no. So I think there's a couple of things in that. Often the reaction I get, and it's not ill intention, but, "Oh, that must be so nice, that must be so rewarding." And it can be, but just to, I suppose, be very honest about it, it's not always. Special Olympics is— I work at the global level, and it's like any other organization. There's politics, there's people who are making the maximum discretionary effort because they really have connected with the with purpose in the way that you're describing, and there's others who aren't. So, you know, you are constantly faced with many of the same challenges that you're facing every day if you're in the corporate environment. So I think that's important to acknowledge. Probably the biggest thing that has made a very positive difference is getting to the why. I think for— Special Olympics has just gone through the 50th anniversary, and I would say for a good 45 of those years, the 'why' was seen as sports, doing sports. So for anyone who's not familiar with Special Olympics, it's— I suppose it's kind of in the name, not fully, but it is about offering sports competition opportunities to people with intellectual disabilities. But I think over the last 10 years, particularly over the last 5 years, the realization has changed, and it's in line with a lot of what we're discussing this morning, a realization of the importance of purpose and culture, and it has shifted completely. If you look at the website now, or if you listen to any one of our— of us talking, it's all about inclusion, because that's the why. You don't just do sports to offer sports, and of course there's a fitness benefit and a wellness benefit and all those good things, but that's not actually the reason that we're doing all that work. It is to achieve the full inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities in society, which is a very, very challenging thing to do. 'Cause as soon as any one of us— and I happen to have a sister, Emma, who has an intellectual disability, so I live this on a day-to-day basis— and we all have this natural reaction where we feel a sort of a care or a sense of looking after someone who's a bit different like that, whereas we're trying to say, well, yes, that's nice, but actually you don't have to always be like that, and that person has a lot of ability. And the job is the same as what we've been talking about this morning, about achieving the maximum potential in that person rather than saying, well, we need to look after them. So I'll just quickly mention one specific example then of how that's transformed, because, you know, the question then becomes, well, what do you do with that? And my quick word on it is it should shape everything you do. And there's a lot in that word, because you could say, well, how does it shape sport? How does it shape other things? So I look after all of our leadership programming, so a very similar role to Pedram's, Cedro in the bank here. And we now have— we're actually next week here in Dublin globally launching a program which we're calling Unified Leadership, where we've shifted the focus away from just focusing on people with intellectual disabilities to saying actually it involves everyone, right? That's the unified word in it. So if you have a purpose, how do you connect it to everyone, I suppose is my point. Because what we've had for 50 years is everyone saying, well, it's about them. I'm going to get that person with an intellectual disability to be better at doing stuff so they can be like us. And we're actually saying no, we're changing that model now and saying no, there's a two-way street here, and we need to go towards people with intellectual disability and change the way we do things, and at the same time obviously try and build their skills so they can do things along with us. So it's a very, very different approach, all driven by a greater clarity around the purpose. So if I had one thought to leave you with on that whole point, it is really going deep on what the purpose is and not stopping short at some of the things you do.

That makes sense. Thank you, great answer. Let me build on that because it was I think a point that Joyce from Ulster Bank made earlier on, that is this just— this whole purpose and Is it the new employee engagement? Is it just the new black? Is it something that's going to come and go because here we are? From an organizational perspective in Google, Alice, where do you see that having real benefit? And is it going to come and go? Is it just the new black?

Purpose as a word is probably the new black. However, the meaning of purpose has been right the way through human civilization. So as I said earlier, if you think about art, philosophy, religion, it's all based on asking why. And so you could actually flip the question and say, why has it taken until now for companies or organizations to think through purpose being an important thing? And I, I think one of the answers, or a possible answer to that for me, is that there is so much choice now for consumers and for workers, individuals, all based on, in a sense, the proliferation of information. So with the internet, you've got a supercomputer in your pocket right now that is more powerful than the computer that sent man to the moon, 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, a 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 important for organizations to be able to persuade people beyond just tactical benefits that there is a reason why people should choose them. Like, 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, I think why has been here to stay throughout human civilization, but now it's all the more important for organizations because of the level of choice that we all have. And as for Google, Google was set up back in 1998 in a garage by Larry and Sergey, who were Stanford graduates. And they actually started with mission. So it wasn't something that was retroactively fitted on afterwards. They said in their garage with their little computers, they said, wouldn't it be nice if we could organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful? And that has been the purpose or the mission ever since. And it started with Google Search, which has been something of a success. 5.6 billion searches per day. And we're also used to it that we don't really stop and think about it all that much, but it's been quite revolutionary in 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 or Nairobi or New York or Dublin, you have the same access to the world's information. But I think on that point of how does purpose to keep moving an organization along. It started with search, but then the whole team around Larry and Sergey, because by now they were out of the garage and into permanent buildings, the whole team around them was thinking through, how do we organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful? And so one person thought, geez, my email is an absolute mess. Can I do just an on-the-side project and try and figure out how to make email better? And Gmail was born out of that. It now has a billion users. Somebody else said, "The world's information isn't just websites. They're not just online. What about all the information that's offline?" And so they decided to try and map all of the streets and locations in the world and make it easier to navigate so that nobody would have to watch their parents having a giant row over a fold-out map in the dark ever again in the car.

Can I just say that Google Maps has not stopped that happening? Google Maps And that still totally happens in our car all the time.

Are you arguing?

I said left.

Why are you going right?

Are you arguing with the voice on Google Maps?

I'm arguing, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But so I suppose that's an example of like over the years, Google now has 9 consumer products with a billion users each. And that has all come from folks innovating and coming up with ideas around that single mission that was written in a garage around making the world's information accessible and useful. So I think it's a great example of how your mission, if you can get everybody who joins the organization on board with it and inspired by it, that's where the groundswell of innovation comes from and should keep coming from.

Just very briefly to close out on your point of that whole idea of just somebody doing a little side project, and the outcome of that was Gmail, and another one was Google Maps. I heard— I don't know if it's true or not, so you can that you can clarify that everybody in Google gets a certain amount of time per week, month, year to do little side projects in pursuit of the purpose, to keep making things better. Is that something that still happens?

Yeah. So they're called 20% projects. And 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. And yes, it 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 directive about how people spend every minute of every day. You don't need to hand every employee a task list and say, you need to do all of these things, and you need to be in at 9:00, and you don't leave until 6:00. All of that prescriptive, directive stuff can go away, because if everybody is motivated by the same mission and you've hired smart, motivated people, then you can free up people to be more creative and innovative and pursue that mission. And it's really— it is a great illustration of how well that can work, that many of our billion-user products weren't— they weren't invented by senior management. They were invented by somebody at ground level who had an idea.

And they weren't a strategy document. There was no strategy document that said, we're now going to do email or maps or whatever.

They were just things that came out of the No, and actually an example of living and breathing mission and purpose also is that actually senior leadership, you have to be willing to take risks because at the point that some brave engineer said, "Let's just map the whole world and put it online to help people," a fairly reasonable management response might be in a classic sense to say, "Well, how are you going to do that? That's impossible," for starters, and B, "That's not economically viable. How is that going to make money?" There was no monetization model whatsoever for maps at the point that somebody came up with that incredible idea. And in fact, strictly speaking, there still is no monetization model for maps. But because we believed in the mission, we were willing to say, do you know what? That would be incredible for people, and it would help make the world's information more accessible and useful. So let's just go and build it and see what happens. So it does take a certain level of bravery and risk taken to go, yeah, I'm truly going to pursue the mission at all levels.

Great. I'm going to ask Margot a question, but then I'm going to come to you guys with the big AIB cube. So start thinking about questions and put on your crash helmets, because you might get this in the head any second. Just building on a point there that Alice made, Margot, around they were lucky, arguably. The lads in the garage had that purpose from from minute one. They knew what they were doing from the very, very outset. If you work in an organization where you don't have that, where you're 10 or 15 or 20 years in and you do 100 different things like Sodexo does, and you're trying to then retrofit a purpose into that organization, how do you go about doing that in a way that is— and it's a word that's been used a lot this morning— is authentic and does connect with people and mean something to them?

So I guess a lot of different thoughts. I love the last question. I guess, you know, the difficulty in an organization like ours— and 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 for change. And I've been through the transformations as well. For us as an organization— and I'll 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, Pierre Bellon, the founder of the company who is still alive and you can still see coming into our office in Paris at 80-something years age, started off with 3 very simple things: spirit of progress and spirit of purpose and 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. That that had come about. And for him, the reason that that actually came about was that he had been— he had been, as a young Frenchman, he'd been a soldier in the war. And he'd come out of sort of back into industry and into a family 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 organisation was all about delivering opportunities for people. And that is kind of how we get our purpose in our organisation, is staying— you know, so if, for instance, like the NASA example, if somebody's 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. Our people do, are cleaning up after the horses in Buckingham Palace or whatever it is, we are very much trying to connect with them the purpose of why they do that and what the endgame is for the people that they do it for. So we connect them with the consumer or the person who it actually matters to. But also getting our leaders to understand that is incredibly important. So I have to give you an example of something that used to make me sort of stay very awake and very engaged on this was I thought about the fact that when I ran the business here, we had 4,000 employees, and every one of those employees, give or take, had a family. So, you know, that was— if I just took the average that most people had 2, 3 people in their family, I had at least 12,000 people whose lives, whose education, whose future ambitions and where they were going to were dependent on decisions that we as a team made. So when I would talk with my team, I'd always say, you know, is this an 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 profit's looking good, we can further invest, but if we do this, is it risky and what does it mean? So connecting back every time to what that purpose is and trying to think about the people who do the nickel and dime work in our business. Am I going to affect them? Am I going to put them at risk? Because if we lose a contract, you know, I 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, you know, it's— and it's talked about a lot at the moment— moving away from just that shareholder value and delivering an end result, thinking, how do we sustain it? So you need to get back to that. Why are we doing it? And how do we keep the people involved? No matter how nice— this conversation is great and I'm totally attuned to it, but we all have ups and downs in how our energy flags. So we've got to keep— for my purpose at the moment, I have 480,000 people and I've got to try and make inclusion feel very real for them, and that will have its ups and downs. So you've got to be able to find momentum with it and connect them back to something that's very core. So I've probably gone on a long ways.

No, no, no, actually I'm going to ask you a wee extension of the question. Question, actually, because you talked about connecting people. And then you talked about, in some of your examples, people from oil rig workers to people in the desert cooking for the army to— and I know you do a lot of home care for the elderly. And the guy that cleans up the horse poo at Buckingham Palace. Do you actually do that? Yeah. OK. That's good to know. Not personally, no.

I've seen it been done.

Before the promotion. So when you think about that, and you then mentioned connecting people, there's no way, even though I know you're a superwoman, there's no way that you can, with 480,000 people, that you can connect all of those people in all of those roles in all of those contexts to that purpose. So whose job is that?

Well, I guess the main job is the people who are their line managers. So yes, we talk about leaders, but it's line managers more than anything else. They have got to be doing that, enunciating that, amplifying it. So, you know, whatever the job is, we're trying to get people to think about who it affects. So a very real example is home care. So if people are going into somebody's home— and I've experienced it myself, you know, with my parents and their time being ill and having Comfort Keepers, which is a company we own, coming in— then you're actually saying, what does it feel like when that carer comes in? In, and if you're the son or daughter of that parent, you can understand the dilemma. I did have that dilemma, you know, were my parents actually going to get fed, were they going to get their tablets, was one of them falling down when somebody arrived in, and somebody goes away after 50 minutes, what actually happens to them? So as line managers, we're always trying to make sure that line managers get that, that they're talking through that and they understand, and then that they take away the obstacles. Obstacles for people doing their, you know, the obstacles that are stopping them delivering that. And that's their more, that's their purpose in it as well. So try to simplify the process. And we were chatting a little bit about at the table earlier on, um, some of my, my partners as in life, that simplicity is expensive. So trying to get to simplicity, trying to, to get to the core of things. So, you know, there is a big lot of complexity to get there But if it's a common discussion and it's something we're iterating and living, then there is some hope. But, you know, it's not perfect and you have to keep trying.

Tara, when you think back to your, when you think back to your days in, or your many years in Skillsoft, and you joined that organization as, you know, the firebrand, making something different happen, bringing them through transformation, what was that the purpose of the organization and how did you and the other execs in the business do that? What were some of the things you were doing specifically?

So yeah, I would say the— because I think with purpose, one of the really important things is how the leaders behave when, you know, when the CMO isn't standing over them saying, this is our purpose, okay, you need to go out and tell people this is our purpose. And what we found is that there's a great story about So when Disney— Pedro talked about Disney— when Disney stores— when the Disney park was opening in California, there was a load of hotels. It was all behind from a time and a budget perspective. And they put one guy in charge, this guy called Dick Nunes, and he had 14 months to get it back on track. And the night before they were due to open the hotel and the park, there was an area outside the front of the hotel that had no sod on it. The sod had been delivered, but they hadn't laid it. And he called back, so everybody, you can imagine, has gone home. They've been working 14 months straight, 80-hour weeks. They're going home to get ready for the big opening in the morning. He calls them all back, his senior leadership team, and says, "We're gonna lay the sod because there's nobody else to do it, okay?" And they're all going, "Eh, what now? Where's the gardener?" kind of thing. And somebody goes, "I've never laid sod before. I don't know how to do it." And he says, '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 fit in. And that was the big thing. We traveled loads, we talked to everybody. I would answer emails from every corner of the globe every single day because I had a lot of people coming to me going, 'I'm just not sure if this is—' because I was the kind of mouthpiece of a lot of the new strategy. I'm not sure if this is for me. And I was kind of like going, well, it may not be. Let's have a conversation about that. And that's a really hard conversation to have. And I mean, this was a 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 only figured out like months later, because I'd be going, why is everybody emailing me back within 4 minutes? Sorry, that's Siri. So I think it is— you have to embody that. If you are paying it lip service, nobody's going to 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. 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 you were with last month. We are now a very different— and we're a tech company and all that. So, we all had to embody it every single— and like culture is what happens when you're not there, real culture. And I think that's the same with purpose, that you have to make sure that you trust people to do what you need them to do when I'm on a plane going to Boston or something.

Yeah, for sure. And that whole idea of improving people's lives is so powerful. And I think it kind of came out in all your answers there, that if you can connect— because we're human. So we're thinking about that from our own perspective. If somebody is going out there to try and make my life better, gosh, and I've got the opportunity to make somebody else's life better, then that's a really powerful motivator. Really powerful.

Yeah, we used to open everything with, we do not make widgets. Thank God. So, you know, because you're actually doing something very— because I would be interested to see how I could get a purpose for if I was a steel manufacturer. I'm sure I could do it. I could do it, but it would take a bit longer. Yeah.

Yeah. Just a week, maybe. Yeah. Just a week. Right. Big AIB ball. Who's got a question for the audience? Who's got a question for the panel? All the way at the back. I'm not sure I can throw that far. I'm only kidding. Jeff. Thank you. And you should be able to— it feels really weird, you can just talk into the cube.

Okay. Is it working?

You might have to hold it closer. Okay. There you go.

Perfect. Bingo. So, and this isn't just because we're in a bank, Pedro, but I think every organisation, unless you're a small company, an SME, as you grow it becomes harder and harder to make sure that everybody within an organisation is operating to your purpose and living by it, and that in all cases there are going to be instances where an organisation fails when it comes to its purpose. So I suppose my question to the panel is, how do you make sure that when an organisation fails that you don't lose sight of your purpose, that you bring it back and make sure that actually you just say, right, well, basically how do you keep the organisation moving in the direction of the purpose when people around them may say, well, how can we say we do that when we've just done X, Y or Z?

Alice, do you want to pick that up?

First? Sure. Two things. First, I think you have to own up to your mistakes. So when things go horribly wrong or there's a glitch or there's a mistake, I think you have to come out and own it and say, yeah, that wasn't in line with what we believe. It wasn't in line with our values, and we're going to fix it. And you have to demonstrably fix it then. And 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 new technology and so things will go wrong. There will be content on YouTube that we didn't want to be on YouTube, but you have to own it, go fix it, and get on with things. On your point of the size of the organization, I'm conscious all of the examples that I shared 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 ground in Dublin, and you might look at it and go, "Well, how do they connect with this lofty mission around making the world's 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 twofold, and hopefully this gives you an illustration of trying to break down a lofty mission that people on the frontline might feel quite remote 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 talk to them all the time about their own mission, which is to help businesses get online and thrive. It's 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. Um, we have companies ringing us the entire time saying, oh my God, that help that you gave me to get 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 I have a full team meeting where we bring forward the most amazing wins that anybody on the sales team has had that week that illustrated that mission or purpose of helping companies get their information accessible and useful. So you take somewhere like McElhenney's Department Store up in Ballybuffey in Donegal, super traditional business, we helped them get online, they're now exporting to 63 countries all over the world and they hired 10 more people off the back of the advertising they were doing. Those are the ways, those are the micro moments where I can celebrate with the team, the moments when they brought the purpose or mission to life. And I think it's, it's in highlighting— you set the tone as a leader, you bring the weather as a leader— and it's in celebrating all of the micro moments where frontline people lived the purpose that you keep illustrating on a day-to-day basis what that purpose means. Because as so many people have said earlier, it can't just live in a 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.

Dennis, you want to pick that up? Failure and what you do when things go wrong?

Yeah, I want to go back to maybe something that Margot said as well, which is around the power of— you know, you talked about the line managers. So to me, that speaks to Pedro and I were speaking before the start about training and education. So I think if things go a little bit off the rails, I wouldn't underestimate the power of going back and saying, okay, not changing the message, because at our table we talked about sustaining momentum is actually sticking to the message, but going back and saying, right, where did it go wrong and how can we do some clever education, training, leadership development and really weave those messages back into that in a way that is relevant for people. It's a word that hasn't come up this morning is relevance, because I think sometimes this stuff can feel a bit obtuse, a bit vague, So it's about bringing it back for people and saying, "Right, 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'd think it would be so self-evident and obvious in Special Olympics. It's not. I can tell you straight off, I could give you many stories of people in Special Olympics not being inclusive, right? And that might seem very shocking, but that is exactly what happens from time to time. It could be a simple thing like if we're We imagine we're a board meeting here, this group in front. Every one of the countries in the world is supposed to have a person with an intellectual disability as a board member, but we've seen time and again that can become very tokenistic, so they're literally there but might as well not be there, to be honest, might as well be a plant in the corner of the room. So, you know, people are not thinking about how they adapt and change. So a lot of the education programme that we're beginning next week is to try and change that mindset and say, what are the adaptations that I can make as a person that does not have a disability that will go down that road towards people with intellectual disabilities and get the best from them? And that creates a relevance as well externally. So it is a very deliberate play to say, as we've changed from, you know, talking about sport to talking about inclusion, that relates to 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 in a corporate, for example, to say, 'This is a group that nobody thinks about. They can be relevant to you and they can bring skills that you may not already have in your team because of the way they think differently.' So there's, there's lots of things that can be done through education and training, I think would be my big point, that you may have started on a certain road with it, but you may realize you need to tweak it and change it, just as we're doing now. Because you realize that the behaviors that you were hoping for are not to be taken for granted or are not happening at all.

And I don't think that failure is always bad. I think that failure can actually be a very positive thing because it means it's surfacing something which has gone wrong that's actually coming up to the surface, and then it can be addressed. And we talked— there were a couple of tables down here that talked about vulnerability quite a lot, and that whole idea of being able to put your hand up and say, we screwed up. To Dennis's point, what did we screw up and how do we fix it? But actually mea culpa, that didn't work quite as well as we thought it would. And that can be very, very, very powerful, really powerful. Let's go back. Anybody else in the audience got a question? Down here, Sam. Hang on a sec. Let me get the— let's not try and brain anybody. That was a dreadful throw.

Thank you. Thank you, first of all. Purpose has been something which I've kind of had a fascination with for most of my life. I went back and did a master's and it was actually one of the areas was on purpose I was looking at. But I came across a model, a Japanese model called ikigai, which is a 4-section model of what purpose is, which is do something you love, do something you're skilled at, do something you get paid for, and do something the world needs. And that last one is the one that really hits me is that sometimes I used to think it was about doing something you love. And it's just that sometimes when you realize that, like, it's about this idea of what does the world need as well. I suppose from an organizational point of view, do you see how that could align for you as an organization? Is that an important point, what purpose is in this world that we're living in today so much more so? Tara, you want to pick that up?

Yeah, I mean, for me, my kind of big thing at Skillsoft was creating women leaders. And so, I'm not going to go through the really depressing, you know, gender pay gap, etc., etc. An even 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 Girls Who Code, lots of girl coding organizations from an IT perspective, but we also developed a very specific Women in Action leadership courseware, which was about— and again, I'm one of those people who, you know, I don't like sitting in lots of rooms with lots of women thinking about how we can support each other. It's great, but if the men aren't in there, forget about it, right? Because invariably the men are in the rooms where the decisions are being made. So therefore you have to figure out how to either A, get into that room, or get a sponsor in that room who's going to talk on your behalf. So, I always say this. I've said this to Scott many times. Women are mentored to death. We are mentored. It's like, you know, it's like adopting a puppy. What you need is someone who's going to frickin' talk about you when you're not in the room because you're not allowed to be there. So, I actually think the CSR initiative Pedro talked about when he was at an interview that somebody asked, what's your CSR initiative? I think that's hugely important. And I think I think that is about, you know, what you're donating from a time perspective. We used to give everybody kind of a day a quarter to go out and do whatever they wanted, once it was a charity. I think that's really important. I think that's very personal though too. So one of the things I used to do, I'm a Girl Guide leader, because again it's all about women and leadership and especially the girls I work with are between 8 and 11, when girls' confidence comes down by about 42%. From when they're 7. So I do an awful lot of that work and I use an awful lot of the, the kind of resilience stuff that I've learned, and I actually think that's what the world needs. But I think that's very personal. But I know, for example, one of the things that Skillssoft does is we donate a lot of our leadership training to the Special Olympics because we believe inclusion and diversity is incredibly important. But 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 of the gate talking about diversity inclusion when there's one woman on the mat, you know what I mean? So bit by bit, but I think that's really important. I think you need to give staff, employees, the freedom to do something with their time or money. And then I also think the company as a whole has to decide that whatever your purpose is, you align something to that. That's my thing.

Margot, do you want to pick that up?

No disagreement with anything Tara said. Going back to the 'do something you love' and how do you— that four quadrants— I think it's incredibly important in articulation in organisations as leaders that you also find ways to make the day-to-day slog, 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— so if I give you an example, we have hundreds of ERGs all around the world, employee resource groups, they call different things in different companies, and listen, they all want money to do different things, you know, and it's always, always about saying, well, you know, we need to engage people in doing what we do and delivering our bottom line so that we can invest in that and invest in our talent and our people. Again, can be very cynical, but Pedro, you talked earlier on about the role models, the people who are growing. If we're going to do, for instance, our big audacious goal, my one and yes, certainly, is to get gender pay equity in 80-something countries. And, you know, 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 kind of bottom lines and to get balance in their teams and all the right things as well. So with leaders and with people at a line management level, you need to show them and help them to understand and feel it. But I probably go back to what I said in the very much in the beginning is if people are not feeling it, if it isn't 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 the water cooler conversation or the coffee conversation when they go to the side is cynical, you've lost it. So the engagement, the involvement, and even 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 input as to the how and listen and be integrating that into the discussion as well. So I think they're probably the additions that I would put to those.

Do you want to add something?

Yeah, I just want to add a really quick point, if I could, to what Margot was saying and just picking up on Tara. And someone else brought it up earlier. Just from a nonprofit perspective, just to give that perspective, on things like the Charity Day, I just want to give a note of caution on it, because I know we're near the end of our 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 that I don't believe really has the deep effect that you might hope it's having by doing it. So I would encourage you to think about connection and relevance to the purpose that's ongoing and sustainable. So the example Tara gave, and I'm not here to, you know, blow that trumpet or promote Skillsoft in relation to what they're doing with Special Olympics, 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 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 organise and don't really have a long-term impact on the organisation you're trying to help. So I'd just be a little bit cautious with that one.

Anybody a David Attenborough fan? So I would bring it back to David Attenborough, because I agree completely with you on the avoiding tokenistic things. 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. We're not like cats. We like to live in packs. And so just at a completely biological, psychological level, there's part of our brain that says, go off and be selfish, take the meal for yourself, look after yourself, sustain your own body and your kids. There's another part of our brain that says, actually, you and your kids can't live in the forest on your own. You have to be sustaining society around you because we only, we only succeed as a pack or as a society or as a whole. So on purpose and what makes it impactful, I would bring it back to that. Like, if you, if you keep in mind that on the why, people are going to have 2 motivators. One is selfishly what's good for me day to day in my job or with the products that I buy, but the other one is going to be this part of your brain that's saying, yeah, but is it going to be— 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 the most powerful missions do incorporate that point of what's good for the world, because honestly, your selfish motivation in a job around am I getting a promotion promotion? Am I getting a paycheck? Does everybody like me around me? I mean, you don't need to put that into a purpose or a mission. It's absolutely inherent in your contract when you join the company, what your selfish purpose is. I think purpose should incorporate generally what about your mission or your day-to-day work is helping the broader pack or society alongside you. And it's almost like a counterbalance to your selfish instincts in the day-to-day, is being able come back to, but hang on, what was our purpose? So I think your point is really important, and I would agree with Denis that it's all the more powerful if it can be built into the company's core purpose as opposed to the purpose being one thing and then separately we're doing something on being green or we're giving some money to charity or running an event.

And for me, when you think about that, that Skillsoft Special Olympics tie-up, you know, when you think about helping to make people's lives better, that that's what you're doing. That you're bringing that to life through the work you're doing in the area of CSR. I'm conscious that I said I would have everybody out of here by 10 o'clock on the button. So I'm going to come to the very last question. And it's literally 20 seconds from each of you. I think people here hopefully have taken away some really practical thoughts and ideas and thinking that they can take and apply in their own organizations. But I want to come to to each of you just really quickly and ask you, what's the one thing that you think people could do to really bring purposes to life in their organizations? Just one thing that you found from your experience that's had a real impact. 20 seconds each. Tara?

I think you need to not underestimate how scared people are of change. I think that's the most important thing. I'm really into change. I lean into it. I love it, I get really bored quickly, but I actually am just starting to realise how people are terrified of change for all the reasons, you know, I can't pay my mortgage, I'm going to have to get another job, I'm not going to have my— that's the big thing for me.

Okay, thank you. Again, very much in agreement with that. I think also to make sure that we involve people, so once an organisation has its its purpose. You know, if you're going to— if you've spent the money, the time, and the research, and you've done all that really well, and it's coming from all the right reasons, then you need to involve people in what that looks and feels like. And 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 their voices heard in it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, because repeat until you feel like everyone thinks you're an idiot. And because literally until every single person on the team can repeat back what the purpose is to you, just how you articulated it, like, it hasn't landed. It was 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 to the mission, and once everyone can repeat it like a mantra, only then have you got a chance that it's actually guiding people's decision-making day to day.

A group of Bain partners a few years ago brought a book out called The Founder's Mentality. I don't know if any of you have come across it. One of the phrases in it is— one of the big themes is a frontline obsession. So that's my main thought, is if you are going to make purpose stick, you have to have a frontline obsession 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 Nelson Mandela shortly before he died. And he said to Mandela, 'What's the secret? What's the biggest thing you would pass on to me or to anyone else?' And he turned to him and he said, 'Keep it simple.' That was it.

Thank you. That's been really interesting. I thought your answers were fantastic. Thanks so much. Please give him a big round of applause. You guys can stay there. It's fine. OK, so just to finish up. 3 minutes left. There's a wee postcard on your tables. Phil has been doing an amazing job capturing all of the thoughts and insights. We will tidy that up and email it out to you. If you want to fill in your details on that card. I podcast and I blog every week. And actually, 3 of the 4 panelists have been on the podcast, actually, as has Pedro. So maybe worth a listen. And if you want to be kept up to date on podcasts and blogs, you can tick that box as well. Phil, you've done a sterling job. Good man. Look at all that. That felt really game show. Sorry about that. Will you send this out? Yeah, we're gonna email it out after. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can scribble your details on the cards and just leave them on the table and we'll collect them up later. And that's it. It's 3 minutes to 10. You're early. Thank you. I am early. Should we do some more questions? Let's do some more questions. Thank you so much to everybody for coming. I know that some of you have come from from far away. There was somebody here from Leash. I thought I was in ribbons this morning getting up at 6:00. She had to leave her house at half 5:00 in the morning. And Dennis has come all the way from Kerry. Not this morning. He came yesterday. So listen, thank you so much for coming. Thanks to Pedro. Just one more thank you. I want to thank one of my colleagues, Linda Young there sitting there quietly. She did everything that you see here today. So he's the brains behind the operation. So I just want to say, a partir de aquí, thank you.