The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies by Ranjay Gulati

Episode Date: February 9, 2022

Deep Purpose: The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies by Ranjay Gulati A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming to you with a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here as always. Be sure to watch our CES show coverage that we just got done doing, CES show 2022. Sharing out so much stuff from our trip down to Las Vegas.

And what a great show it was. It was pretty amazing. So go watch all that content. And a lot of it was on the podcast as well, so you can check that out. Also go to goodreads.com, for instance, Chris Voss. See everything we're reading or reviewing over there. And youtube.com, for instance, Chris Voss. See everything we're reading or reviewing over there. And youtube.com forward slash Chris Voss. Make sure you subscribe.

Hit the bell notification button so you can feel like you're part of something much larger. You can also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and check out our new LinkedIn newsletter. That thing is rocking over there on LinkedIn. It's pretty crazy. Anyway, guys, we have another amazing, brilliant mind on the show. We just seem to always have brilliant people that expand your mind and make your cranium larger, if you will, or at least the inside of your cranium. The author today is Ranjay Gulati. He is the author

of the book that will be forthcoming on February 8th, 2022, as of this recording, Deep Purpose, the heart and soul of high performance companies. And he's coming to us as a professor at Harvard Business School. You may have heard of him. They're pretty smart people over there. And an expert on leadership strategy and organizational growth. Until recently, he chaired the Advanced Management Program, the school's flagship senior leader executive program. He has authored seven books, including Deep Purpose, The Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies, which will appear, as we mentioned, in February 2022. He has been ranked as one of the top 10 most cited academics in the field of economics and business by ISI Insight and has received similar recognition from The Economist, Financial Times, and The Economist Intelligence Unit. His research has appeared in leading academic journals of business as well as major publications like the Harvard Business Review, my love, Wall Street Journal, Forbes

Strategy and Business, and the Financial Times. Welcome to the show, Ranjit. How are you? I am great. Thank you very much, Chris. Nice to be here with you today. There you go. It's wonderful to have you.

Congratulations on the new book. Give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs, please. So, look, I wrote this book because the idea here is to inspire others to imagine bigger possibility for their business. And I find that role models are the best way to try to understand how maybe there's a way to reimagine how we can run our businesses today. And so give us your.com where people can find you on the interwebs or wherever page they can do to familiarize themselves with you. They can go to the book website,

which is deeppurpose.net, or they can go to my own website, which is simply ranjagulati.com or find me on LinkedIn. So I'm reasonably active there. And so they're welcome to connect with me on any one of those platforms, if you like. There you go.

So what motivated you to on to write this book? The book actually is a personal project. It came first, I would say, I would start to credit my students. I was chairing a program called the Advanced Management Program. My students would routinely ask me, they're all working executives, saying, Rajay, you need to stop just telling us about how a business can perform better. We have so many other pressures today. Employees, customers, communities,

environment. How do we tackle all these things? How do companies actually elevate themselves in a multi-stakeholder world? And I dodged and ducked through that. And then two of my good friends actually sat me down and they said, listen, Ranjay, we were having a chat and they said, you teach business. How can business really deliver value long-term for society, for community, for everyone around them? What do you teach? I said, I don't know. I haven't thought about that. And then the next question they asked was like, so what's the purpose of a business?

Like, how do you, does a business have a purpose? Like, why does a business exist? Well, to make money, shareholder value, good products. I found myself mumbling and rambling. I really didn't have an answer to this. And then I had come across a few kind of inspiring examples. One of them was my own family business. My mother had started a business when I was a kid.

And that did phenomenally well. But it was also part of that project was uplifting rural communities. And so through those kind of everything kind of came together and I felt the time was right. I needed to examine are there inspiring companies that know how to make money, be super successful, while also having an impact, a positive impact on other stakeholders around. We talked a little bit of the pre-show. A lot of people find your, they tell you as an individual, find your purpose in life. But I've never really thought of a business as having like a purpose, find your business purpose. I suppose in some ways a little bit, but not really.

I haven't really identified it as that, I guess what I'm trying to say. So great question, Chris. So asking somebody, a person or an organization about purpose is one of those pause questions. It forces you to stop and think. You can't just glibly wing it. You can't wing your way through a question like that. Why do you exist, Chris? Why do you exist? So what is purpose for an individual? Let's confront that first. So there are many definitions. You can go back to Aristotle, ancient Greeks, but I'll pick one from a Stanford psychologist named William Damon, who said purpose is a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at

the same time meaningful to the self and consequential to the world beyond the self. Oh, wow. So it has that duality. Yeah, and it's something that is stable and generalized. So the question is, why do you exist? Now, the same question can be asked of an organization. It's like forcing a conversation about first principles. Why are you here?

It forces you to clarify your goals. It forces you to imagine like a positive difference. Everyone wants to, hopefully most of us, want to have a positive impact on the world. So it may sound like a very academic exercise, if I may say so. But, and for many it is. It's just a mission statement.

Right? For many it's wallpaper. And I'm the first to confess it. Five years ago you told me, Ranjay, are you going to write a book about purpose? I would say you're crazy. Because to me it was like, it's a mission statement. It's a wallpaper. Who cares? Yeah. I haven't really put in a, it's a mission statement. It's a wallpaper. Who cares?

Yeah. I've not really put in a lot of value into mission statements. I've seen too many corporations that they're the complete opposite of their mission statement. Like Google's, what was it? Don't do evil or whatever. Financial Times had an article titled, looking for purpose in a purpose statement, question mark. So should we be making purpose statements for a company instead of a purpose statement? Question mark. So should we be making purpose statements for a company instead

of a mission statement, maybe? We can split hairs on that one, but I think the point is that you can have a statement, whatever you want to call it, mission statement, purpose statement, but it's what you do with it. So Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, whom I interviewed

for this book, said to me, writing a purpose statement is easy. What comes next is much harder. Definitely. That's where the rubber meets the road, right? Yeah. So how do you live your purpose? How do you actually say, okay, are we really? And Chris, I mentioned to you a big company like Microsoft, but I really got my deepest insights from looking at small companies. Because many fast growth

ventures are animated by a purpose, ideology, this kind of belief, we're going to change the world, we're going to do this differently. And many people confuse it, oh, it's all about making money. Of course, they want to make money. Of course they want it to be a success. But is that the, that's not the end. The goal in many cases, so the article I wrote was called

From Ideas to Ideals. Yes, you want a big idea, but you also have an ideal. I want to change the way X is done in the world, whatever that X might be. And so having that animating, expansive view of yourself gives you a better strategic perspective

because you look at your business differently. You have a more expansive system view of what's happening around you. Where are we going to play? Where are we going to play? How are we going to play? It's motivational. It brings and attracts the right kind of people who want to be what? Attached to the ideal, right?

It connects you to the right kind of suppliers and customers who say, I want to work with that kind of company. I trust. And it works your brand. There's all this talk about purpose-driven branding that is out there today. So actually what I uncovered to me, the learning as I researched this was, and I interviewed over almost 250 people across 18 companies. So this is a long project. And what I uncovered was the ones that really understood this idea, really worked hard to make it part of the DNA, the fabric of the company. And so what should companies be doing?

Should they be sitting down and writing a purpose or finding a purpose? Is it harder to do that as a larger company than as a smaller company? I've run a lot of my own little companies over the years, well, since I was 18. And it's easy for me to put purpose on it. If you're, I don't know, T-Mobile or something, AT&T, I mean, is it harder to find at that level? So let's take a few examples. I'll take Lego as one example. So Lego was in deep trouble a couple of decades ago. They were almost bankrupt. And they got this new CEO, Jorn von Lidstrup.

And the same thing happened, by the way, at Microsoft. He said, oh, we need a new strategy. We need a new team. We need a new organization. We need to fix a lot of things. We also need a new purpose. We need a new organization. We need to fix a lot of things. We also need a new purpose. We need to understand what's our purpose. Because all this stuff is going to fit together.

We can only transform a business when you understand the purpose of the business. And then the interesting insight was the Lego CEO, Yaron, told me, he said, you don't invent a purpose. You detect it. It's already there. You can't go hire a PR agency and say, give me a purpose. Come on! Find me a purpose. You know, it's like detect it. Or you discover it. So he

went on a listening tour to understand what made Lego special. He went and met the founder's son, who was long retired, to understand. He went and met the founder's son, who was long retired, to understand. He went and found the original house where the Lego founder had started Lego. Oh, wow. He then found the pieces that he had carved,

and there were some slogans and logos he had written. To understand, let's look at the foundational moment of this company. Oh, wow. Why are we here? And here's the interesting part. One of the things I describe in the book is that it's really easy to get lost in the past. You can become nostalgic about the past.

So there's a beautiful Ghanaian myth about a bird called the Sankofa bird. And the Sankofa bird is a bird which is flying forward but its head is looking backwards and the idea is you need to fly forward but don't forget where you came from and and maybe that will guide you because you understand where your basis of your roots are and similarly for even for microsoft when if you look at Satya Nadella's book, you know, it's called Reset. And it's rediscovering. So he's talking about saying, we want to remember where we came from, but we got to look forward. This is not about recreating the past. Yeah, but let's acknowledge the past and be enriched by the past of who we are. So I think that's just the discovery

that I'm actually discovering to the discovery. I'm just going to the beginning. So just how do you get a purpose? Once you have a purpose, you've got to communicate the purpose. How do you make sure people understand it? It's not simply, you can't just put an email out there. I found that some leaders really engage in what one of them called surround sound communication, telling the big story, making it personal, making it real. What is our purpose? Why are we here? You can't just make an abstract. Please read the purpose statement.

If you look at, there's an article by Indra Nooyi in the Harvard Business Review where she described what she did at Pepsi. So she made it personal. She talked about her childhood growing up in chennai in india where there was no water and how water scarcity affects vast chunks of the world and what it meant for her she talked about pepsi and saying look at how much water we consume how can we reduce water consumption how can we make water part of our business you start to understand how leaders tell the story, but that's the starting point. Then you've got to do what I

call rewiring the organization. And that's a whole story in and of itself. There you go. So when you do this, does this help? We talked pre-show about how there's this great resignation and people are searching their own personal purpose and trying to either find companies or starting their own companies to achieve that purpose. Is this a way that leaders can bulwark against turnover and loss? And maybe by having a company purpose, you can make more people more interested in me, what the company value is valuing. Chris, we are today facing what I would say is a meaning crisis in the world. I think one thing COVID has done is made us introspect a lot more than ever before about who am I? Why am I here? What's the meaning of my existence? What's my legacy? What do I want to do? You can understand why you have people leaving their jobs in record numbers, relocating away

from where they used to live, moving close to nature. There's a lot of things that start to make sense when you understand that we are all looking for meaning and purpose in our lives. Even during the coronavirus, it helped me focus on what I was doing. And I spent a lot of time pondering stuff like, why, what am I doing? And you realizing how frat world, the world in life become. I was just reading one of my Facebook friends, one of her relatives, I don't know if she was vaccinated or not, but one of my relatives, or not my relatives, one of my friends on Facebook, one of her relatives died of COVID. And immediately after getting it, going right into the hospital and unfortunately passed away. And just like that, gone. And I think that really

has honed a lot of our minds in that there's a certain aspect of this life that is more fragile now than ever. And I think that's what's caused a aspect of this life that is more fragile now than ever. And I think that's what's caused a lot of people to rethink these things. So many of us have been touched by these things directly or indirectly. Pretty much every one of us knows somebody who either died tragically or got very ill or was impacted in some direct or indirect way by what's happened around us. It forces us to confront our mortality, which then forces us to reflect on these kind of questions. And I think that's where we are. Now, here's a question what I want to contemplate with you.

At one level, I might say, why, Ranje, you're studying purpose of companies? I don't know about that. One of my biggest learnings was that these companies try to connect the purpose of the company with the purpose of individuals. Meaning, asking the question, why are you here? So is that a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a wonderful thing because it is saying, hey, I can't expect you to connect to some abstract purpose statement of the company when you yourself aren't even thinking about your own purpose in life. And I learned this from actually Pete Carroll, the coach of the Seattle Seahawks.

So one of the organizations I looked at was actually Pete Carroll and the Seahawks. And it's interesting. Pete, who's a very introspective person, asks himself and his players, what's your purpose? Are you here just to win? Make money and win? Is that the objective? What is your purpose?

And through this dialoguing around asking people about their personal purpose, he also connects them because once you're thinking about your own purpose, it makes you more... Another one I found, another organization, where they asked every employee

to write on an index card, why do you come to work? Why do you think about that? Why do you come to work? Pills. Now, that's true. That is definitely one part.

Is it the only thing? Okay, let's put bills as a baseline, okay? I can relate to that one. What else? I don't know. Something to do. Okay. You're starting with a very low bar here, Chris.

It's a low bar. No, it's good. No, I mean, I think part of it comes in my search for meaning and purpose and like what I want to achieve and achieving what I like, doing what I like, doing what I like, I suppose, maybe. Doing what I like and enjoying the freedom to be able to pursue what I want. So look at that. So suddenly that line of questioning has taken you to a deeper place. Is that right? Yeah. Beyond. There we go. Now imagine if you are running an organization

and you start the same conversation at the organization level. And the question is going to be, why do you exist? I said, well, pay the bills. Shareholders are done, right? I got people who want their money back. So there we are. So you have the analog there. And then the question, you keep asking the why, and you get to a better place. Now, the part that I found confusing was connecting these two ideas.

It's one thing to have individuals pursuing their purpose, doing whatever they want in their lives. And then there's an organization doing its purpose and do these things intersect with each other. And I found really interesting examples where companies were saying to their employees, I want you to ask yourself, what's your purpose in life? Because you see, purpose has many layers to it. It's a layered concept. There's purpose in life. There's purpose in my career. There's purpose in my work. Even for an individual, we are thinking of purpose in many levels. And then that's me. That's me, Ranjay Gulati, my purpose. And then there is my employer's purpose, Harvard Business School, educate leaders who make a difference in the world.

So my having a purpose makes me more open to hearing about the organization's purpose. And ideally, I'm looking for an intersection because in this meaning crisis we are in, people are looking for more coherence in their lives. Between their work and their life. You can't say, I'm going to compartmentalize. I don't care what I do, nine to five. You got me, punch in, punch out, and then I live my life. I'm living my life. Once you establish a purpose, do you just need to establish a purpose, say this is our purpose, or do you need to be mindful of is this a purpose that can motivate people to do better? Or I'm not sure. So first thing I want to do is separate up having a purpose statement from having a purpose.

A statement is just a bunch of words, right? They're representations of what your intention is. There's two parts to a purpose. One is goals, what I want to get done. And the other one is what loosely you might call our duties. Or what you might call ideals that I aspire to do. Right? So one is more around, hey, I want to get these five things done in my,

like the New Year resolution we make. What are the five things I want to get done this year? Those are goals. And then there's a larger context around what are my ambitions for myself? And remember, if you've read Joseph Campbell about the hero's journey, all of us humans have an inner hero's journey.

We all want to be heroic in something in our lives. We want to be remembered for something great we did. All of us have that desire to tap into our own inner hero's journey. Most definitely. Yeah, and purpose gives us a way to understand what that might be, what the possibility might be. Does the purpose have to be something that's any world hunger or some sort of social thing, or can it be a little bit more selfish? Can it be like our goal is to increase shareholder value, or is that, does it need to be something that, I guess what I'm trying to ask is,

does it need to be something that isn't so selfish maybe? Chris, that is an excellent question and very deep because I found one thing as I began this project. The word purpose has been hijacked. And it's hijacked by all kind of vested interest, if you will. On the one extreme, you have people saying purpose of a business, at least, is shareholder value. Come on, that's what businesses are for. You've got shareholders who risk their capital and you've got to deliver a return on their capital.

It's very clear. And people talk about this as an economic perspective and say that's the model of the organization. And they say that if you understand that, you also understand that a firm, an organization is what they call is a nexus of contracts. It's a bunch of people contracting with each other. You do this job and I'll pay you this much money.

So everyone is in a contract and you have this organization that is devoid of any meaning, it's just a transactional place where everyone transactions with everyone else. That's one view. The other extreme is that purpose is anything but profit. Purpose is social, it's environmental, it's all the good stuff, altruistic stuff. So there's a lot of confusion about purpose. And I would like to submit,

I think purpose of an organization can have both commercial and social element. A business exists to make money and hopefully net have a positive impact on the world around it. You can't say I'm making money and I'm polluting the hell out of everything around me. You know, because that's,

but that was the case a lot of times before when these things were not priced into the pricing or what companies could do. They could pollute and get away with it. So you could charge a low price for your product because you don't have to cover the cost of

cleaning up after you. So you have to understand that what is my net footprint? What's the footprint of my organization? Am I having a positive impact around me commercially and socially? Now, I have to say one thing that I learned is as true for individuals as it is for organizations. There is shallow purpose and there's deep purpose.

The title was very deliberate. Deep purpose instead of shallow purpose. This is really interesting to me because I've been sitting here thinking about my experience and I talked about this in my book where when I started my companies, I didn't do the normal entrepreneur path where I started something that I truly loved and I had a passion for it. And it was something I created that I loved. I loved being an innovator. I loved being a CEO. I liked the power of being the guy and the challenge of it, just being thrown into the jungle and having to build a village. And for me, that was the juice. Just having CEO on my card and being the guy who had to innovate and had all the pressure and the challenge. I mean, it wasn't

about just being the CEO. Some people just like, I want to be the CEO. It was the pressure cooker of just being under that microscope of being able to build a business. And I really struggled and burned out a lot with those companies because I didn't have what most entrepreneurs have, this love of this thing. I love them as my children, but I didn't have this really passionate love where I was like, oh, cool, we're doing mortgages. Wow, I can't wait to get up this morning and do more paperwork. There just wasn't that juice for me. And there never has been in most of the companies other than my podcasts. And that's even after we re that's not until we rejiggered it for COVID after COVID and brought on more authors. Did I finally fall in love with it? But I can see how something like this, where

I should have said maybe the, some of those companies, what is the real purpose of this? And I remember a silver streak express company early on, we started making a profit. One of the first things I started doing was donating a portion of our profits to Primary Children's Hospital, their child abuse ward or abused children ward. I don't know what it's called. But we started doing that every month. And that really helped me give a crap about what we're doing and stuff. And then we fell away from that. And I don't know, we just got busy doing whatever we started doing that every month. And that really helped me give a crap about what we're doing and stuff. And then we fell away from that. And I don't know, we just got busy doing whatever we're doing.

But I can see how it would have been a whole lot more easier for me looking back at my companies if I would have said, what is the real purpose? Because I just looked at them as an investor or VC. And that's not the most fun. Because you really just like squeeze profit out of it. I don't care. So this is a great story, Chris. And I'll tell you, just to build on your story, actually, it's a great story.

And I want to use it to illustrate my point. Let's take the investors, first of all. Investors, of course, care about returns. That's paramount and everything else. But even there, you see some change, rumblings of change, right? With an increasing push towards ESG, looking for social impact, measurable social impact. So even investors are demanding more of companies, right? And they want measurable impact, not just like smoke and mirrors impact.

So there's talk over there, investor pressure building, maybe not as much as you would want it to be, but definitely there. Let's look at the employee pressure. And I'll pick on good old Abraham Maslow. And everyone talks about Maslow's hierarchy of need. Maslow never had a hierarchy. Some consultant translated his theory into a triangle and then everything became about the triangle.

That was not, but Maslow did have a set of tiers. and then everything became about the triangle. That was not. But Maslow did have a set of tiers. So let's start with the lowest tier. The lowest tier at one level is I do what I do to make money. I want to get paid. I want to get returns. Of course I want that.

Yes. No taking that away from me. You take it up a notch or two, you say, I want interesting work. I want to be energized. I want to be stimulated. I want to be energized. I want to be stimulated. I want to be creative. I want to have a chance to do something with my brain and be creative.

And I don't want to be stifled. So I say, ah, that's interesting. And then you take it up another notch. And you start to see people talking about, I want to have an impact. I want to see having an impact on the world around me. Can I have a positive impact on my customers? I'd love to see having an impact on the world around me can i have a positive impact on my customers i love to see that i want to see what i'm doing that actually impacts people in a positive way around me and that may encompass commercial and social impact so i'm not even saying people purpose as social stuff only i'm not suggesting that i'm saying it can be commercial and social impact and you know

what it does now let's talk about worker satisfaction and productivity there's research showing that there are dissatisfied workers and then they're satisfied workers is that right yeah that was the study that was what people studied for 60s 70s job satisfaction was the thing then from there we had this huge step up to saying, no, they want engagement. And then we started measuring engagement and said, engaged workers are much more productive than satisfied workers.

Satisfaction isn't enough. You want engagement. We're saying engagement is not enough. You want inspired workers. And one study in 2015 showed that inspired workers are 2.25 times more productive than satisfied workers. Wow. Inspiration is a huge aspect of motivating human nature. And so how do you elicit that sense of pride?

Now, go back to the model I said to you earlier that an organization is a bunch of contracts. Or is it more than a contract? How can you get people to show up to work beyond just a job or a contract? How can you get them to for themselves and for you? How do you create that context? And it addresses the meaning crisis also in their lives and allows you to channel that meaning to deliver great productivity and results and hopefully a social impact and a commercial impact. So that's where I'm trying to understand.

Can companies do that? And I imagine with the millennial generation, when they came into the job market, and I think the Gen Yers, Gen Zers, they search more for purpose and stuff in what they do. So this probably is more appealing to them. So I haven't seen any reliable data on this, but I've heard of this anecdotally plenty of times, that the younger generations compared to baby boomers, we are the more pragmatic generation. But I think it's not just pragmatic. I think there was an acceptance that work is work and life is life. I live my life outside of work. So I pursue whatever purpose I might have outside of work. And survival and stability and security and comfort were so paramount in our lives that those became the

purpose. Our purpose became the pursuit of comfort. And I don't want to characterize and generalize an entire generation over here, but I think this is generally what people are starting to talk about, that younger generations are much more interested in purpose than perhaps the baby boomers were. And again, I haven't seen the data, but it makes sense to me. But, and if it's true, if it's true, then this is even more important that as an organization, how do you create what one scholar once called a field of meaning? And he talked about, another one talked about how leaders need to have to stop being just plumbers, but also poets. He says leadership is not just plumbing, it's also poetry. How do you inspire, elevate people's thinking, expand their horizons? How do you do that poetry work and not just plumbing work, showing up every day saying,

fix this, do that? So there's a lot of consequences. And I haven't talked about any examples, but I looked at some fascinating stories. Etsy is a great story of that. How they went about it. I mentioned Microsoft earlier. Or you can look at Warby Parker. Or another one is Gotham Green. If you buy salad at Whole Foods, especially in many major cities, actually, or you're buying basil or any of the herbs, you're probably buying Gotham green lettuce or herbs. And they are an urban farming company that operates out of rooftops in urban cities. And that reduces transportation costs.

It reduces spoilage and allows them to, and vastly, because they're using hydroponic techniques, vast reduction in water consumption. Oh, wow. So how do organizations like this, and they make money. Let me be very clear. They're delivering returns to their shareholders. This is not about a charity project. And so how do organizations like this that are profitable

while having a positive impact around them look at Warby Parker with the buy one give away one they're giving away eyeglasses to make them affordable both in the US to people who can't afford them but also in other parts of the world where having eyeglasses is a luxury yeah it's something where but also in other parts of the world where having eyeglasses is a luxury. Yeah, it's something where people have to find.

So what did Lego, we started this show talking about Lego. What purpose did they come to after doing their whole journey, if you will? So, you see, Lego's realization was that we're not just selling building blocks. We're not just selling buildings. It's so easy to get identified with the products you're selling, right? We're not selling entertainment. It was all about intelligent play. The original idea was around, I can create a play which also in some ways provides something intelligent for the child to do, right? Spatial, visual thinking, creating, building.

There's a lot of intelligent play involved. And to come to understand that allowed them to quickly figure out what businesses they needed to get out of. Because they had expanded into a whole bunch of stuff. The reason they were almost bankrupt was they had expanded into a whole bunch of stuff the reason they were almost bankrupt was they had all these adjacent markets they had gone into that completely caused chaos for them they had massive inventories because they had so many skus they were they were just spread completely so far thin and so the question was let's go back to why we chose to be.

And from that, let's now map out our strategy. You see, a lot of people say, oh, first make a strategy, then you can do all this. No. What's our purpose? And I should also clarify to you that once you have a purpose and a strategy and an implementation plan, it forces you to think about the culture of your organization. Who are we as a group? Because purpose then forces you to ask the question of what are the principles we live by?

How do we operate? What kind of culture do we want to create? It's interesting. Steve, Pete Carroll, let me go back to Pete. At the Seattle Seahawks, they have two words to describe their culture. And it's emblazoned on the door, everyone touches where the players go out to play. It's called, it says, I'm in.

So that's, so you start to say, how do I create a positive environment where people feel engaged, they feel they're living their own life purpose, you're having an impact on the world around you, and you work for a successful organization too. Everyone wants to work for a successful organization too. So I think it's the ability to connect those ideas.

So I came away from this whole project feeling very inspired that it's about living your purpose, not in a shallow way, but in a deep way. And by deep, it permeates all that you do. Right? It's really, it's not shallow it's deep it's stable it's generalized remember what i said to you it's stable generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond

this i think it helps so many different corporations and of course people find more purpose in their value. Because, you know, there's companies that I work for or consulted with where I'm just like, I just feel like we're just feeding a giant bank and just making money for profit. And like, this just seems it gives that lifelessness to corporations. And I think this is such a better way to do it. Do mission statements need to go away in place of a purpose statement? In many companies, what they call mission statements are really purpose statements.

I wouldn't want to say one over the other, but I'll tell you to your point, here's the part that bothers me. The part that bothers me is what I would call is purpose washing. Purpose washing? Yeah. Purpose washing is where you're hiding behind this cloak of virtuousness. Let me give you a purpose statement and you tell me who you think said this. To facilitate the early detection and prevention of disease and empower people everywhere to live their best possible lives. CDC? This is Theranos. Oh.

Let me give you another one. Compassion for patients and excellence in science inspire our pursuit of new medicines. Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Okay. Or let me give you the last one to become the world's leading energy company creating innovative and efficient energy solutions for growing economies and a better environment worldwide enron oh in fact one scholar in 1997 wrote an article called sex, lies, and mission statements. Sex, lies, and mission statements. That's hilarious.

And so others have called this virtue washing. One of them called it virtuous side hustles. So there are some harsh words people have used because, and this gives purpose itself a bad rap. This is, oh God, Ranjay, are you serious? This is all a bunch of smokescreen. And whenever companies get into trouble in any kind of public relations thing,

then you say, okay, gotta get a purpose statement here. Get the PR folks here. Let's create a purpose statement. Guess who in 2016, when they were in deep trouble, came up with a purpose statement called to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. Wow.

You have companies parading purpose statements in a kind of a virtue cloak. And that makes everyone become, that makes the world much more cynical. We are all cynical about these things and say, and that's honestly, that's where I began. So when I first began this research, I said, I can't. This can't be true. I mentioned to you the Financial Times article that was the baffling search for purpose in a purpose statement.

Yeah, Google's don't be evil or don't do evil, whatever the hell that was. They finally gave it up. They're finally just, yeah, we're not following this. So let's just give it a lip service. And some companies evolve their purpose statements also over time. And I think it's worth taking note

of how they evolve those statements over time. And I think it's important to understand sometimes you do need a refresh. Lego's purpose statement officially was to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow. Or if you look at, say, Microsoft, they actually changed their purpose statement over time. And so you have people evolving their story in multiple ways. So they had one under Bill Gates, they had one under Palmer, and then you have Nadella coming on board and coming up with another one. But again, I told you what I said earlier.

Writing a paper is easy. What comes next is much harder. So I wouldn't get fixated on some words. It's really about being able to connect that purpose to the individual. I'll give you one. Kathleen Hogan, the CHRO of Microsoft, said this to me, because they want people to really resonate their personal purpose with the organization. And she said, you won't fully work for Microsoft until you make Microsoft work for you.

So you flip it around. It's not a job. We don't want it to be a job for you. Now, the cynics in this conversation might say ranje these are cults they're trying to brainwash us into we i want to just go in there and punch in and punch out and what are you telling me i gotta buy into your kool-aid drink your kool-aid and believe all this stuff i don't want to do all that i I'm here for a paycheck. And there are people who subscribe to that view. And I think that's fine. There are many companies who believe in that too.

So I think there's going to be a sorting in our labor market. Maybe that's what's going on right now is the sorting itself, sorting itself, if you will. Yeah. That's a good plausible hypothesis. That may be what's going on. But I want to leave us with a hopeful message. I want us to be hopeful. I think all of us, I wrote a short little article two weeks ago about New Year resolutions.

And I said, it's great. We should all have a New Year resolution. I made one too. Here's my little poster sticky. I have my New Year resolution. I have five things I want to get done. And only 4% of us are going to ever accomplish our New Year resolution.

Sorry about that, folks. Fine. Maybe, just maybe, at the start of this New Year, we should be asking, all of us should be asking ourselves, what's my purpose? Am I living my purpose?

What is my workplace like? Am I living my purpose? What is my workplace like? Do I feel my workplace is connecting or amplifying in some way my own personal purpose? And if it is not, is it time for me to go? Maybe I should expect more of my life and my workplace. And I go back to the word I used earlier, coherence. I want to see connection. I don't want to be compartmentalizing my life and saying, I've got to punch in, punch out, nine to five job here.

And then I go out and do whatever I want to do after hours. And maybe there's a way to accomplish all and a lot of entrepreneurs who are successful talk about their work is an extension of who they are they work like crazy that's how i was but it's a part of who they are because they feel they're doing something bigger than themselves they're building something and that that's why these days, the management lingual around it is, oh, founders saying, I need founders' mindset. I need my employees to be

as excited as I am about my company. It's certainly easier to do that if you talk about if you build a purpose. Because there were employees that came to me and said, I don't know, seems like the only thing we're doing around here is making you rich, Chris. Because, you know, just everyone's like, there were employees that came to me and said, I don't know, seems like the only thing we're doing around here is just making you rich, Chris. And I'm like, yeah.

But again, Chris, you can tap into different levers here. One is you've got to share equity. So you share the goodies with others. That's one way. But that alone is not enough. People think that here's what's happening today. Many companies are throwing money at the problem. There was an article

a few weeks ago in Wall Street Journal, I think, on how everyone's paychecks are going to go up this year, which is a wonderful thing. I think that's a wonderful thing that's going to happen, if that's true. But is money going to solve the meaning problem? No. Never does. You need money. I'm saying money problem? No. Never does.

You need money. I'm saying money is a given. Yes, that's a baseline. Interesting work is a baseline. You need those things. I'm not trying to say they don't need them. Purpose alone won't do it either. You need to be a successful organization with a wonderful... I want to just share with you one more last thought on this one.

Okay. You can't have purpose and just live on purpose when it's not a company that doesn't make money and doesn't do good by its customers. You need a business, first of all. You need a viable that has a financially viable model which delivers return to its shareholders and delivers tremendous value to its customers so they win in the marketplace. Right? You can't eat purpose. So we've got to have a finance, and this is what happened actually at Etsy. If you look at the Etsy story,

actually it starts the other way around. Etsy began with a beautiful idea. Bob Kalin, the founder, himself was a carpenter. And so he wanted to build a marketplace for sellers, craft sellers. And this thing took off because there were all these people

doing craft work at home who wanted a cheap, inexpensive place, a marketplace to sell their things. This thing grows and he always wants, he doesn't necessarily want it to make money. he says it's for the sellers i'm a seller so it is has a strong idealistic cast but at some point the

businesses and so this thing ipos and then it's still not making money and now you've got shareholders are saying wait a minute and and the employees are doing very well they take care of their employees they have yoga classes they have all kinds of things for them, which I think is wonderful. You can't completely do it at negating shareholders. And at some point, the sellers were doing very well. The buyers were frustrated. So along comes in a new CEO who says, guys, we've got to have a financially viable business to be living our purpose. And by the way, we have sellers, but we also have buyers.

And we've got to take care of the buyers. And you start to see, to live our purpose, you've got to have other pieces of the puzzle in place as well. Have a viable business that delivers for its shareholders, for its customers, for its employees. And purpose can just make that task. I really love the idea because my problem was once I became successful and quote-unquote rich, I reached a point where I'm like, is this all there is, man? Is this all there is? It seems like, I don't know. One thing I learned is that it's not all about money and it can all be about money. Because if you're messed up personally, if you have issues personally,

getting money and getting rich and getting successful only amplifies those problems. It just makes them worse. And it doesn't make them better. I always thought that if I make a lot of money, it'll fix all my problems, or at least I can afford the psychologist, which is true. But in the end, it really made things worse. Like it just brought out the worst parts of me because you can be validated by everyone. Everyone's like, you're rich. Yeah, go ahead and still keep doing murderous things or whatever you do with your life.

What is interesting, what you're saying, what you just described has two components. One is psychologists have shown this already many times. There's diminishing margin of utility of money. You look at all the lottery ticket winners and you look at how long their spike in happiness lasts. It spikes up, but then it goes back exactly to where they began, six months or one year later. So the spike of kind of a shocker event where suddenly lots of money comes to you doesn't have a permanent enduring effect. Okay, so that's the first thing we all know

from decades of research now. The second one, I don't have a social science theory to back up, but I'll just quote my late father-in-law who said, money gets you comfort. It doesn't buy you happiness. That's true. I like that saying. Money gets you comfort, doesn't buy you happiness. That's true. I like that saying. Money gets you comfort, doesn't buy you happiness.

Yeah, I had more money than I ever had in my life, and I was so unhappy. And everyone else was unhappy with me too. I was like, they loved it when I was buying. But this has been really insightful. I've learned a lot of great stuff. This is going to be an amazing book, Ranjit. As we go out, anything more you want to plug or touch on to tease out about? I just want to say one last thing. My hope is that the book, of course, will show us how

inspired leaders are looking for a new reality they're trying to create. But my message to everybody is that I think we should all expect more from our lives. I think we shouldn't sell ourselves short, right? Depending on your belief system, you have one life and you may want to make the most of it. And how do we make the most of it? You know, one young entrepreneur told me how she did a pivot in her life. And the pivot to her was by asking herself a question. How much is my time worth?

Ah, that's a very important question. And suddenly when she started putting her number on, I think, that's it? That's it. I'm selling myself short. Definitely. Definitely. A lot of people need to ask that question. Well, Ranjit, it's been wonderful to have you on. Give us your dot coms

or plugs for people to find you on the interwebs. Find me on LinkedIn as Ranjit Gulati. You can Find me on LinkedIn as Ranjay Gulati. You can find me at ranjaygulati.com or you can find my book actually at deeppurpose.net and or else you can also go to Twitter. I'm delighted, happy to keep the conversation going. I put out a newsletter once every two, three weeks.

One page, not longer than that on LinkedIn. I keep it short and I pick one, and I just talk about one idea that I believe is important for all of us to be thinking about. So you'll find it on LinkedIn as well. Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to be here with you today. Thank you for being on the show with us. We certainly appreciate it. Guys, go order the book, pre-order the book, February 8, 2022 2022, Deep Purpose, the heart and soul of high performance

companies. Thanks everyone for tuning in. Be sure to be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.