Hi helpful contributizers,

What follows is the third and final extract from Chapter 1: Purpose.

Feedback desired:

• Is this section useful, practical and actionable?
• Do you have any additional ideas, comments or edits?

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How can you locate a Purpose of Significance?

Let’s get practical. Put simply, there are three steps in the journey towards uniting a group of people in an organisation behind a shared purpose:

1.    Finding it
2.    Framing it
3.    Living it

1. Finding it

Clearly the first step is to find and agree on a purpose that makes sense to the organisation and its competencies andt can excite and inspire its people. There are two obvious routes to locating a Purpose of Significance:

•    From the individual – commonly a leader’s personal passion or perspective
•    From the group – through a collective effort

In the individual mode, inspiring individuals like Muhammad Yunus from Grameen or Su Hardy from Mooncup stumble upon or are already driven by a cause, a personal mission.
We all have passions burning inside us. Locating our own can feel impossible, it can seem so foggy and far from beliefs about what work is and should be. But the happiest and most successful people are generally doing something they love – they love their work AND they get paid to do it.

Discovering your personal passion and purpose can be as simple as reflecting on what it is you really enjoy, what it is you want to give, what gets you riled up, furious, hysterical and arm-waving, laughing out loud. It’s about locating those embers that are already burning.

Coaching

The coaching world is very good at this, and there are some great ‘visioning’ exercises that an experienced coach can take you from, and in fact helping someone find their higher purpose is what gets most coaches very excited and passionate. The process is enjoyable, relaxed, enlightening and the results can be life-changing. Personally, I have worked with the CTI and found the quality of their coaches (and their coach training) to be incredible.

What’s Your Purpose? by Richard Jacobs

Richard Jacobs’ brilliantly designed work takes you through seven questions to ‘Find Your Answer’. I found the audio book to be an excellent way of consuming the content and working through the simple, enjoyable exercises. I can still remember how, through the course of a 1 hour train journey from Brighton to London in the middle of a frazzled busy working day, I’d sketched out some profoundly useful descriptions of what it is I wanted to give to the world. Highly recommended.

Leadership: Plain and Simple by Steve Radcliffe

In this excellent and very easy to read book on leadership, Steve Radcliffe walks you through a very practical approach to locating your own passions and then bringing others on the journey through his Future, Engage, Deliver model. As with ‘What’s Your Purpose’ there are a really tight set of wonderfully simple, open questions to get you clearly, but matched also with practical approaches to getting a wider team performing too.

In groups

In larger groups, the challenge to find a uniting purpose can feel much harder, but the result is obviously that much more powerful when it engages a whole group – be that a team, a small business, a division or an entire corporation.

My feeling is that again the purpose is lingering in the background, waiting to be dusted off and shared around. That, however hard or poor things have been, teams and organisations are often drawn together by implicit values and a purpose that may be shared but is also buried.

One method for locating a Purpose of Significance here is to run workshop groups of 8 to 15 people in a reasonably quiet and ‘safe’ space away from normal desks and interruptions and to ask some of the same questions covered in the two books mentioned above, but in a group setting.

In my team working for our clients or equally to develop our own company we often use white walls and Post-It notes or stick index cards up so that everyone can see them, providing prompts like:

•    What do we care about?
•    Why do we do the work we do?
•    What really matters?
•    What is the purpose of our organisation?
•    What do we want for the future of this group/team?
•    What can we give that really matters to the world?
And using the initial surge of answers as the start of a collective discussion about what the shared purpose will be.

    2. Framing it

Having identified a purpose, the vital key in this next century is clearly linking this purpose to a matter of significance in the world. For example, whilst working in Denmark I was told the story of a Danish company called Groundfos – a company with a long history of manufacturing excellent pumps for a variety of purposes, producing some 16 million pump units a year. My friend told me that what Groundfos had done in recent times to help lift and guide the whole business was to reframe its matter-of-face production of pumps in the context of a world where have access to clean drinking water is still a huge challenge for millions of people in the developing world, and where sustainability is becoming acutely important.

Today Groundfos frames what it does in this context:’ Grundfos is a global leader in advanced pump solutions and a trendsetter in water technology. We contribute to global sustainability by pioneering technologies that improve quality of life for people and care for the planet.’

So the opportunity here is to link what your company does with something that really, really matters in the 21st century.

    3. Living it

Living the Purpose of Significance is the fun bit. It’s the bit that, having clarified it, will be get easier and more exciting with every day that passes.

It is challenging yourself and those around you to find the link between the work and the purpose.

Living it also means sharing it. This generation of radical businesses are happy to champion and evangelize the issues that they stand for. They share knowledge freely, from seminars to articles and speeches – spreading and championing their cause.

Summary

This chapter about Purpose is deliberately first: it is where everything starts. Engaging with a Purpose of Significance transcends and influences everything else that follows. It is the keys to kingdom, the guiding star, the secret sauce! Without a clear personal and organisational purpose that really matters – a Purpose of Significance – everything else is window dressing and ‘nice to have’. This is where the magic starts. Enjoy it for what it is.

And although it may feel overwhelming and impossible to change, it really is not. Go for it, start soon. You’ll amaze yourself and the people around you.

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This is the last extract from Chapter 1: Purpose. You can find the previous two on this Contents page.

Next week’s chapter – assuming I finish it in time this weekend – is on Democracy at work.

Thank you so much for your attention:

Please give me your feedback, comments, suggestions and support either in the comments section, tweet @willmcinnes / hashtag #cltrshck or email wmcinnes@gmail.com.

Please all bring others with interesting or strong (and alternative) perspectives into the conversation – forward to a friend and all that.

In the previous extract, I introduced the idea of Purpose of Significance.

Got some great feedback, though I think I need to be clearer: these are EXTRACTS as when I pasted the whole 4,543 words into WordPress it looked shit and overwhelming!!! 🙂

In this extract, I’ve shared 3 of the 7 organisations I’ve picked as examplars, companies that act with real Purpose of Significance.

Feedback desired:

• Does this kind of content make sense?
• Can you see how their Purpose has them act in an unusual, positive ways?
• Do these kind of organisations inspire?
• Also included in the full chapter: Apple, Google, Grameen, Mooncup or People’s Supermarket – how do these look as a full set?

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Who is leading the way?

Let’s look at some examples of pioneering businesses to get under the skin of what is really possible here.

Patagonia, California, USA

Patagonia, the manufacturer of outdoor equipment with a particular heritage in climbing, is a wonderful business. You may have read ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard (if you haven’t, do!). With a long track record in zigging when other businesses zag, and having a consciense that goes beyond box ticking, Patagonia was one of the two original creators of the 1% For The Planet initative – a global movement of over a thousand companies that donate 1% of their sales to a network of environmental organisations worldwide.

In its most recent, and perhaps most inspiring and jaw-dropping move the company has formed an alliance with eBay to actively promote and encourage existing owners of Patagonia equipment and apparel to sell it in a branded shop called the Common Threads Initiative within eBay. It is actively encouraging potential customers to buy second-hand, used equipment. And not just inside eBay: items listed for sale in the Common Threads Initiative are also promoted on the ‘Used Clothing & Gear’ section on Patagonia.com. In conventional thinking, this is plain STUPID! This will, you’d think, negatively impact short-term profits, limit growth, generally not be a good thing to do.

20th century business goes out of its way to encourage as many new sales as possible. But, driven by a higher purpose and with a clear sense of itself and what it stands for, Patagonia intends to tangibly address the issues of global sustainability itself. This not only addresses one of the greatest challenges our society faces, but also leads from the front: I recently met with one of Patagonia’s biggest competitors and he told me, smiling with admiration, that this move ‘changes the game, changes everything’. Brilliant!

This is truly a Purpose of Significance in action. As Chounaird is quoted in a BusinessWeek article from 2006: “”Every time we do the right thing, our profits go up”. Smart business; 21st century business.

Box copy:
Patagonia in 2005: $260m revenues in 2005, 1,250 employees.

Noma and The New Nordic Cuisine, Copenhagen, Denmark

Have you heard of Noma? If you’re a foodie, the answer is of course yes. Noma was ranked as Best Restaurant in the World by Restaurant in 2010 and 2011. Noma isn’t in New York City, Tuscany, the hills of Catalunya, Paris, London or Tokyo. Noma – famous for  dishes and flavours that celebrate the very best of Nordic/Scandinavian produce – is in Copenhagen, the gorgeous capital of Denmark. When you start to look into the story behind Noma there’s a fabulous and inspiring story of how purpose and meaning can fuel incredible achievement, and simultaneously create and empower a whole generation of likeminded changers.

As Claus Meyer, co-owner of Noma, describes on his website: “Less than 10 months after the opening of our restaurant “noma” November 2003, head chef, manager & partner Rene Redzepi and I took the initiative to organize “The Nordic Cuisine Symposium”. The day before the symposium September 2004, at an 18 hour long workshop, some of the greatest chefs in our region formulated the New Nordic Kitchen Manifesto. The Nordic Cuisine Movement was born!”

The movement that Meyer describes goes much further than fancy restaurants for the few. In 2005 the manifesto was adopted by the Nordic Council of Ministers and their extended national development programmes. You can find articles about The New Nordic Cuisine on Denmark.dk the official website of Denmark and Meyer himself participates in a long-term food programme with the Danish government and universities to improve food health including around childhood obesity.

This manifesto is a fantastic example of a group of individuals transcending their own self-interests to put down a marker and describe a Purpose of Significance that inspired and enabled a whole movement.

In doing so Noma created and placed itself in a context of higher meaning. A backdrop that could engage and impassion every would-be employee, every diner, every producer and supplier.

Would this have been possible if it was simply one person’s drive for greatnesss? If it was the same old story about a celebrity TV-friendly chef on their way to millionaire-dom? Ask a Dane what the New Nordic Cuisine has done, and they will tell you: restored pride in our national identity; changed our expectations and habits around eating and food; promoted Denmark to the world. This is what can be done with the power of Purpose of Significance – change that affects millions.

Box copy:
Noma sales, profits, size.

Anonymous, the internet, everywhere

Anonymous is an interesting organisation. For starters, I’m not sure how we’d define or understand it as an organisation, and certainly not as a business – Anonymous is usually referred to as ‘a loose collective of hackers and activists’ or similar. Anonymous is very much of the Zeitgeist: at the heart of recent activism including the Occupy movement; digitally networked; apparently decentralised; powerfully branded; and perhaps most fascinating and relevant here, motivated by a very strong sense of values and justice. And in this very changed world, we need to look at the edges and the radicals to understand how all of our organisations are going to have to change.

At the time of writing Anonymous may have:
•    Hacked the Sony Playstation Network, creating huge reputational damage and heavily impacting the share price of Sony
•    Hacked the Iranian government
•    Threatened a Mexican drug cartel
•    Threatened NATO
•    Taken down 40 child porn websites and published the names of 1,500 frequent visitors to one of the largest of these

It would be easy, thinking with a conventional mindset, to write off Anonymous. What would the old school business person say? ‘Kids, hackers, mindless vandals, people with nothing better to do – lock ‘em up!’. I think that’s missing the point. Anonymous is creating enormously powerful results, and at its core their is this sense of purpose – as they say themselves: “We are fighters for internet freedom”.

If we pay attention there is much the conventional business can learn from this unpaid, volunteer network of loosely connected activists. What Anonymous provides the 21st business person with is an unexpected and powerful example of the real-world results that can be created when people unite behind a shared Purpose of Significance. And Anonymous achieves all of this in a world where there are record numbers of young people unemployed, where technology is increasingly pervasive and disrupting of the status quo, and as Bill Rhodes, the famous banker puts it “new technologies mean that markets move in nano seconds”.
Specifically, how does Anonymous communicate its purpose, its intentions and values? How did Anonymous create these in the first place, or do they just emerge and develop over time? What is that Anonymous does that allows it to transmit its purpose so clearly to the world with so few conventional resources at its disposal? And perhaps what would our organisation look like if it were more Anonymous-like?

Box copy:
Anonymous statistics: unknown!

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The final extract from this chapter will be on How to get there!, coming later this week.

Thank you so much for your attention:

Please give me your feedback, comments, suggestions and support either in the comments section, tweet @willmcinnes / hashtag #cltrshck or email wmcinnes@gmail.com.

OK, here goes..

The whole chapter was too wieldy at 4,543 words so I am dividing Chapter 1 into 3 extracts that I’ve reduced down and will blog individually through the week:

1. Introducing Purpose of Significance – below
2. Inspiring examples – tomorrow/Weds
3. How to get there! – Weds/Thurs

The kind of feedback I’d value:

• Does the idea of Purpose of Significance work for you?
• Are the two bulleted lists missing anything, or even over-stating things?
• Comments on style
• Typos, grammar stuff
• Does this approach work for you – or would a PDF or shorter extracts be better?

Also: I plan to write the Intro at the very end, so this may start with a jolt – just imagine you’ve read some cool uplifting stuff about how we’re all changing the world!

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Chapter 1: Purpose

Last century we in the world of business lost sight of higher meaning, of purpose beyond simply profits. People – many of us – went to work every day without a sense of a more meaningful contribution beyond the monthly pay packet, the sense of responsibility, slaving away working for the man, for anonymous, financially-driven shareholders, in businesses large and small. The trudge, the wear and tear of everyday business and the bad behaviour of many corporations turned business into a dirty word.

So what do we do now?

This is the opportunity we have before us. To guide our organisations, our teams, our projects towards higher meaning. To be part of the movement that demands a greater contribution from business than just profits. To discover and share real purpose.

A Purpose of Significance

An organisation designed to thrive in this radically different century before us has a very clear purpose that creates meaning way beyond financial results. A purpose that solves big meaningful challenges and opportunities in society. Something that really makes sense. This is a Purpose of Significance.

Why does A Purpose of Significance matter?

The simple truth is that today the accepted wisdom is that the purpose of a business is to increase shareholder value. Purely and simply. This is what is ingrained in business schools and boardrooms, in the minds of so many of us – it is very hard for any of us to stray from this path.

Increasingly we’re realising that where this gets us to isn’t such a pretty place. As the inspiring Umair Haque tweeted: “Making shareholder enrichment the basis of an economy is probably an idea that belongs up there with Cheez Whiz and Donald Trump’s hair.”

Why will a Purpose of Significance make a difference?

In practical terms a clear purpose helps in the following ways:
•    Attracting and then retaining the very best talent in your workforce – see People
•    Unlocking the highest levels of engagement – see People
•    Acquiring and retaining customers in an environment of ruthless competition and the ever-present threat of commoditisation
•    Providing both a compass and a motivation for innovation
•    Gaining competitive advantage from very diverse (and often otherwise disruptive) stakeholders by framing the organisation in a context that truly matters and contributes to society

What does A Purpose of Significance look like?

The thing is, the idea that Purpose really makes a difference in business in not new.

Then what is different with this movement of 21st century businesses? Today, it is the Significance bit.

We can put a man on the moon, we can invent better mousetraps and sell a bajillion plastic bottles of mineral water. To be ‘compelling’ in today’s world, we must work towards the urgent, the difficult, the pressing problems of our time.

The enlightened shareholders, employees, partners and consumers of the 21st century demand a Purpose of Significance.

A Purpose of Significance: the checklist

Here is how to think about how to design a purpose that fits:

•    Does this Purpose address a fundamental problem that is caused or excarcebated by this businesses industry?
•    Does this Purpose lead to decisions which can surpress or limit short-term financial gains for longer-term achievements?
•    Does this Purpose inspire a community to develop?
•    Does this Purpose address a fundamental injustice in the world?
•    Does this Purpose disrupt and positively revolutionize a whole marketplace?
•    Does this Purpose fundamentally make the world a better place?

This is our job. This is how to make business better. This is how business can help to solve the big problems of our time.

Please help make this better through the comments or by email to wmcinnes@gmail.com 🙂

The next extract will be published tomorrow: Chapter 1: Purpose, Inspiring Examples. And then later in the week: Chapter 1: Purpose, How to get there! And we’re off…