Thinking on Purpose

Determining the purpose that motivates you can be the key to finding fulfillment in life and success at work. Nikos Mourkogiannis tells you how.

By Nikos Mourkogiannis

You are an MBA student trying to decide between similar offers from two rival investment banks. You are a middle-ranking executive weighing a potentially career- defining move	to an international competitor. You are a board director approached for a CEO position at a company you don’t know well at all.

How do you make your decision? What factors should you take into account?

Obviously you will consider compensation, company performance, reputation and geographical location. But the most critical factor of all may not occur to you until it is too late: the purpose of the company, and how well it fits with your own predisposition and priorities.

People often think that companies only have the “purpose” of making money. But this is not the whole picture. Many of the most enduringly successful companies have been driven by something beyond profits, such as discovering new things, helping other people, producing excellence or becoming the best player in their industry.

A company’s purpose, in short, is the set of reasons for conducting business that resonates with people’s ideas about what is right or worthwhile. These ideas are personal; everyone has a unique view about which purposes are worthwhile. But they are also typically rooted in one or more traditions articulated throughout human history by moral philosophers. These traditions draw on common experience and world views and have played a major role in shaping modern culture. Hence individuals from widely different backgrounds can often resonate with the same purpose.

A clearly understood purpose can link management and employees in a natural, unforced, and highly productive way. When there is a common purpose in an organization – one that appeals to the moral ideas of a critical mass of employees – individuals are more likely to act with conviction and self-determination without being micromanaged. Furthermore, if this purpose also coincides with the strategic strengths of the company, then the company will be on its way to long-term success.

Purpose only has this force if it is pursued genuinely for its own sake. This is one of the great paradoxes of purpose: by among for an objective that is more important than money, companies actually make greater profits in the long term.

The Four Kinds of Purpose

In the research for my book, Purpose: The Starting Point of Great Companies, I identified four kinds of purpose suitable for global companies, each based on a different moral tradition: discovery, excellence, altruism and heroism.

Discovery put America on the map, men on the moon and the dot-coms in business. It is associated with a search for the new and strong intellectual curiosity. Sony, IBM, Google and many technology-based companies have succeeded by prioritizing creativity and exploration. Their purpose is rooted in the belief that life is a kind of adventure. As individuals, we are free and should not be bound by convention, but this freedom carries its own imperative. Precisely because we are free to choose a course, so we are obliged to live up to the promise we have made. Thus, companies driven by discovery will often go far beyond the expected amount of effort to pursue their aims 0 and often get rewarded for it. This tradition was articulated by Soren Kierkegaard and subsequently by the existentialist philosophers.

Excellence built the great cathedrals of Europe and many of today’s most successful professional firms. Apple, BMW and Chanel have all constructed their identity around the excellence of what they do and are able to charge premium prices as a result. But excellence doesn’t need to imply a premium brand: for Toyota, excellence means aiming for zero defects. This type of purpose implies standards, like those of an artist, defined not just by customer demand but by the innate qualities of the product or service. It is rooted in the intuition or belief that excellent performance of our role in life is the supreme good. The moral ideas on which this purpose is based were articulated by Aristotle, who argued that the ultimate end of human activity is eudemonia, which can be translated as happiness, but is perhaps closer to fulfillment, flourishing or success.

Altruism lies behind a whole range of businesses that exist primarily to serve their customers; it also drives many not-for profit organizations. It is common in small businesses in which the proprietor knows his clients, but there are also larger organizations that have institutionalized the natural human instinct to help others. For example, the Marriott Hotels and Tesco (with its tagline “Every Little Helps”) have both built their enormous businesses on their reputation for making customers happy. But altruism need not be directed at customers. The Body Shop famously refuses to stock products that have been tested on animals and also seeks to safeguard the interests of its suppliers in the developing world. John Lewis states in its constitution that it exists to increase “the happiness of its members” (by which it means its employees). The ideas behind this kind of purpose were articulated by Scottish philosopher David Hume, who argued that we care about others’ well0being as well as our own. Indeed, we maximize our own happiness only by taking into account the happiness of others, trading off our selfish pleasures against our instinct to care about others.

Heroism drove the Roman Empire, the success of Wimbledon champions Serena and Venus Williams and many spectacular growth companies. Henry Ford, who single handedly “democratized” the automobile, is an obvious example of a heroic leader. Bill Gates, with his plan to put his operation system into every desktop computer, is another. Microsoft has consistently fought to make sure that its products are the most widely used – whether that product is Windows OS, Office or Internet Explorer. Like other heroic business leaders, Ford and Gates created the standards that others were forced to follow. This moral tradition was set out by Friedrich Nietzsche. Like the philosophy of discover, it is based on the premise that human beings are free and should not be bound by convention. However, while an existentialist would argue that we are all free to choose, a Nietzschean believes that only exceptional people are able to achieve this freedom. Such men or women are the elite leaders who can command those who lack the necessary character.

Know Thyself

As a Greek, I have always believed in the importance of the ancient aphorism “know thyself”, which was inscribed in golden letters on the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. People who were coming to ask the famous Oracle of Delphi for advice were entreated to find self-knowledge before they asked their questions.

Clearly, “know thyself” is vitally important when it comes to questions of purpose. The first thing I would suggest for anyone who wishes to understand his or her own purpose is to read over the four traditions describe above. Which one resonates most deeply with you on first impression? Which feels right or rings most true? You may then want to think about the companies and business leaders you admire most, and ask yourself why you admire them and what purpose motivated them.

To assist people in better understanding the moral traditions that guide them, we at Panthea, the strategic leadership consultancy in which I am the senior partner, have created the Purpose Profiler. The profiler seeks to find out which traditions an individual has most sympathy with, asking questions such as, “When you look at a company to work for, what is most important?” And “How would you describe what you get personally out of business life?”

One important thing to note though is that while a company thrives by unifying around a single direction, an individual can feel the pull of more than one kind of purpose. Someone who is equally attracted by, for example, altruism and discovery would feel morally at home in an organization driven by either of these kinds of purpose. The Profiler on the Purpose website, in its first month of operation, received hundreds of responses. It is too early to analyze the data in detail – that will be the subject of future research projects - but it is interesting to observe that only around one-fourth of the people who have responded so far identify strongly with a single purpose; the rest are attracted to more than one, even if they have a favorite.

The Company’s Purpose

If you are in one of the situations described at the beginning of this article, knowing what kinds of purpose attract you is clearly insufficient for an informed decision: you must also have a sense of the purpose that predominates in the company in question.

Discovering the purpose that animates an organization is not always an easy task. When you are researching a potential employer, you will already be trying to find out as much relevant information as possible. You will probably visit the website and read annual reports and press releases to see what the company says about itself. You will ask friends about their personal dealings with the company, recent and current employees, competitors and clients. When you are interviewed, you will try to get a sense of the character of potential colleagues or managers. One section of the Purpose Profiler inquires about the purpose that predominates in the respondent’s employer: you may wish to use versions of some of these questions in your conversations.

In addition, once you understand your own purpose, keep it in the back of your mind while you are considering all the different aspects of the company. Annual reports or mission statements tend to give a rosy view of the moral outlook of a company, so try to find inconsistencies. For example, a low-cost airline that talks a lot about excellence is either a liar or will quickly go bankrupt.

Leading with Purpose

It is easy to overlook purpose when searching for a job, but no other factor may be as important; working with colleagues whole moral ideas resonate with your own can help you find fulfillment in life and can also enable you to be more successful. This is all the more vital as you advance in the company and are called upon to set the direction for those around you. If you personally struggle to believe in the reasons for your collective endeavor, then you will find it very difficult to persuade others to believe in it.

On a recent glance over the FTSE-100, I noticed that fewer than 20 of the CEOs of those companies had served as CEOs before. Many had been heads of business units, many had served as CFOs or COOs, but very few had already led another company. The same appears to be increasingly true around the world. Whatever the reasons for this, it is clear that if you succeed in becoming a chief executive, the likelihood is you will only get one chance.

To make the most of this kind of opportunity, you cannot afford to be out of sync with those around you or with the purpose that motivates them. So, regardless of the career stage that you are in now, develop a clear sense of your own moral compass to help guide you in future career-defining and life-defining, decisions.

Originally published in the Business Strategy Review, Spring 2007

Thinking on Purpose

john_byrne

2008-06-23

Businessweek