Purpose
We know from statisticians that demographics is destiny. And we know from the Rolling Stones that you can't always get what you want. What we don't know is what happens when these two indomitable principles sit down, pour themselves a drink, and get to know each other better. But we're about to find out.
In 2006, the first members of the baby-boom generation began turning sixty. On birthdays with big round numbers, people usually stop, reflect, and take stock of their lives. And I've found that when boomers, in the United States and elsewhere, reach this milestone, they typically move through a three-stage reaction.
In the first stage, they ask: "How the heck did I get to be sixty?"
When their odometer flips to 6-0, people often are surprised and slightly alarmed. Sixty, they think, is old. They tally their regrets and confront the reality that Mick Jagger and crew were right, that they didn't always get what they wanted.
But then the second stage kicks in. In the not-so-distant past, turning sixty meant that you were somewhat, ahem, long in the tooth. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century, anyone who's healthy enough to have made it six decades is probably healthy enough to hang on a fair bit longer. According to United Nations data, a sixty-year-old American man can expect to live for another twenty-plus years; a sixty-year-old American woman will be around for another quarter of a century. In Japan, a sixty-year-old man can expect to live past his eighty-second birthday, a sixty-year-old woman to nearly eighty-eight. The pattern is the same in many other prosperous countries. In France, Israel, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, and elsewhere, if you've reached the age of sixty, you're more than likely to live into your eighties. l And this realization brings with it a certain relief. "Whew," the boomer in Toronto or Osaka sighs. ''I've got a couple more decades."
But the relief quickly dissipates-because almost as soon as the sigh fades, people enter the third stage. Upon comprehending that they could have another twenty-five years, sixty-year-old boomers look back twenty-five years-to when they were thirty-five-and a sudden thought clonks them on the side of the head. "Wow. That sure happened fast," they say. "Will the next twenty-five years race by like that? If so, when am I going to do something that matters? When am I going to live my best life? When am I going to make a
difference in the world?"
Those questions, which swirl through conversations taking place at boomer kitchen tables around the world, may sound touchy-feely. But they're now occurring at a rate that is unprecedented in human civilization. Consider: Boomers are the largest demographic cohort in most western countries, as well as in places like Japan, Australia,
and New Zealand. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the United States alone has about 78 million boomers—which means that, on average, each year more than four million Americans hit this soul-searching, life-pondering birthday. That's more than 11,000 people each day, more than 450 every hour.
In other words, in America alone, one hundred boomers turn sixty every thirteen minutes.
Every thirteen minutes another hundred people-members of the wealthiest and best-educated generation the world has ever known begin reckoning with their mortality and asking deep questions about meaning, significance, and what they truly want. One hundred people. Every thirteen minutes. Every hour. Of every day. Until 2024.
When the cold front of demographics meets the warm front of unrealized dreams, the result will be a thunderstorm of purpose the likes of which the world has never seen.
THE PURPOSE MOTIVE
The first two legs of the Type I tripod, autonomy and mastery, are
essential. But for proper balance we need a third leg-purpose,
which provides a context for its two mates. Autonomous people
working toward mastery perform at very high levels. But those who
do so in the service of some greater objective can achieve even more.
The most deeply motivated people-not to mention those who are
most productive and satisfied-hitch their desires to a cause larger than themselves.
Motivation 2.0, however, doesn't recognize purpose as a motivator.
The Type X operating system doesn't banish the concept, but it
"I believe wholeheartedly that a new
form of capitalism is emerging. More
stakeholders (customers, employees,
shareholders, and the larger community)
want their businesses to . .. have a
purpose bigger than their product."
MATS LEDER HAUSEN
Investor and former
McDonald's executive
relegates it to the status of
ornament-a nice accessory
if you want it, so long as it
doesn't get in the way of the
important stuff. Yet by taking
this view, Motivation
2.0 neglects a crucial part
of who we are. From the
moment that human beings
first stared into the sky, contemplated
their place in the
universe, and tried to create something that bettered the world and outlasted their lives, we have
been purpose seekers. "Purpose provides activation energy for living,"
psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi told me in an interview.
"I think that evolution has had a hand in selecting people who had a
sense of doing something beyond themselves."
Motivation 3.0 seeks to reclaim this aspect of the human condition.
Baby boomers around the world-because of the stage of their
lives and the size of their numbers-are nudging purpose closer to
the cultural center. In response, business has begun to rethink how
purpose figures in what it does. "As an emotional catalyst, wealth
maximization lacks the power to fully mobilize human energies,"
says strategy guru (and boomer) Gary Hamel,3 Those staggering levels
of worker disengagement I described in the previous chapter have
a companion trend that companies are only starting to recognize: an
equally sharp rise in volunteerism, especially in the United States.
These diverging lines-compensated engagement going down,
uncompensated effort going up-suggest that volunteer work is
nourishing people in ways that paid work simply is not.
We're learning that the profit motive, potent though it is, can be
an insufficient impetus for
both individuals and organizations.
An equally powerful
source of energy, one
we've often neglected or dismissed
as unrealistic, is what
we might call the "purpose motive." This is the final big distinction between the two operating
systems. Motivation 2.0 centered on profit maximization. Motivation
3.0 doesn't reject profits, but it places equal emphasis on purpose
maximization. We see the first stirrings of this new purpose motive in
three realms of organizational life-goals, words, and policies.
"In a curious way, age is simpler than
youth, for it has so many fewer options."
STANLEY KUNITZ
Former U.S. poet laureate
Goals
Boomers aren't singing alone in their chorus of purpose. Joining
them, and using the same hymnbook, are their sons and daughters known
as Generation Y, the millennials, or the echo boomers. These
young adults, who have recently begun entering the workforce themselves,
are shifting the center of gravity in organizations by their very
presence. As the writer Sylvia Hewlett has found in her research, the
two bookend generations "are redefining success [and} are willing to
accept a radically 'remixed' set of rewards." Neither generation rates
money as the most important form of compensation. Instead they
choose a range of nonmonetary factors-from "a great team" to "the
ability to give back to society through work."4 And if they can't find
that satisfying package of rewards in an existing organization, they'll
create a venture of their own.
Take the case of American Gen Y-er Blake Mycoskie and TOMS
Shoes, the company he launched in 2006. TOMS doesn't fit snugly
into the traditional business boxes. It offers hip, canvas, flat-soled
shoes. But every time TOMS sells a pair of shoes to you, me, or
your next-door neighbor, it gives away another pair of new shoes to
a child in a developing country. Is TOMS a charity that finances its
operation with shoe sales? Or is it a business that sacrifices its earnings
in order to do good? It's neither-and it's both. The answer is
so confusing, in fact, that TOMS Shoes had to address the question
directly on its website, just below information on how to return a
pair that's too big. TOMS, the site explains, is "a for-profit company
with giving at its core."
Got it? No? Okay, try this: The company's "business model transforms
our customers into benefactors." Better? Maybe. Weirder?
Certainly. Ventures like TOMS blur, perhaps even shatter, the existing
categories. Their goals, and the way companies reach them, are
so incompatible to Motivation 2.0 that if TOMS had to rely on this
twentieth-century operating system, the whole endeavor would seize up
and crash in the entrepreneurial equivalent of a blue screen of death.
Motivation 3.0, by contrast, is expressly built for purpose maximization.
In fact, the rise of purpose maximizers is one reason we
need the new operating system in the first place. As I explained in
Chapter 1, operations like TOMS are on the vanguard of a broader
rethinking of how people organize what they do. "For benefit" organizations,
B corporations, and low-profit limited-liability corporations
all recast the goals of the traditional business enterprise. And
all are becoming more prevalent as a new breed of businessperson
seeks purpose with the fervor that traditional economic theory says
entrepreneurs seek profit. Even cooperatives-an older business
model with motives other than profit maximization-are moving
from the shaggy edge to the clean-cut center. According to writer
Marjorie Kelly, in the last three decades, worldwide membership in
co-ops has doubled to 800 million people. In the United States alone,
more people belong to a co-op than own shares in the stock market.
And the idea is spreading. In Colombia, Kelly notes, "SaludCoop
provides health-care services to a quarter of the population. In Spain,
the Mondragon Corporacion Cooperativa is the nation's seventh largest
industrial concern."5
These "not only for profit" enterprises are a far cry from the
"socially responsible" businesses that have been all the rage for the
last fifteen years but have rarely delivered on their promise. The aims
of these Motivation 3.0 companies are not to chase profit while trying
to stay ethical and law-abiding. Their goal is to pursue purpose and
to use profit as the catalyst rather than the objective.
Words
In the spring of 2009, as the world economy was reeling from a
once-in-a-generation crisis and the financial shenanigans that stoked
it, a few Harvard Business School students glanced in the mirror
and wondered if they were the problem. The people they'd aspired
to be-financiers and corporate dealmakers-weren't, it turned out,
heroes in an epic tale, but villains in a darker story. Many of these
high-profile businesspeople were the ones who pushed the financial
system to the brink. Meanwhile, these young men and women looked
among their classmates and saw the seeds of similar behavior. In one
survey of MBA students a few years earlier, a whopping 56 percent
admitted to cheating regularly.6
So a handful of Harvard second-years, fearing that what was once
a badge of honor had become three scarlet letters, did what business
students are trained to do. They made a plan. Together they fashioned
what they called "The MBA Oath"-a Hippocratic oath for business
grads in which they pledge their fealty to causes above and beyond
the bottom line. It's not a legal document. It's a code of conduct.
And the conduct it recommends, as well as the very words it uses,
leans more toward purpose maximization than profit maximization.
From the first sentence, the oath rings with the sounds of Motivation 3.0:
"As a manager, my purpose is to serve the greater good by bringing
people and resources together to create value that no single individual
can create alone," it begins. And on it goes for nearly five
hundred words. "I will safeguard the interests of my shareholders,
co-workers, customers and the society in which we operate," the
oath-takers pledge. "I will strive to create sustainable economic,
social, and environmental prosperity worldwide."
These words-"purpose," "greater good," "sustainable"-don't
come from the Type X dictionary. One rarely hears them in business
school-because, after all, that's not what business school is supposed
to be about. Yet students at arguably the world's most powerful
MBA factory thought otherwise. And in just a few weeks, roughly
one-quarter of the graduating class had taken the oath and signed the
pledge. In launching the effort, Max Anderson, one of the student
founders, said: "My hope is that at our 25th reunion our class will
not be known for how much money we made or how much money
we gave back to the school, but for how the world was a better place
as a result of our leadership."7
Words matter. And if you listen carefully, you might begin to hear
a slightly different-slightly more purpose-oriented-dialect. Gary
Hamel, whom I mentioned above, says, "The goals of management
are usually described in words like 'efficiency,' 'advantage,' 'value,'
'superiority,' 'focus,' and 'differentiation.' Important as these objectives
are, they lack the power to rouse human hearts." Business leaders, he says, "must find ways to infuse mundane business activities with deeper, soul-stirring ideals, such as honor, truth, love, justice,
and beauty."8 Humanize what people say and you may well humanize what they do.
That's the thinking behind the simple and effective way Robert
B. Reich, former u.s. labor secretary, gauges the health of an organization.
He calls it the "pronoun test." When he visits a workplace,
he'll ask the people employed there some questions about the company.
He listens to the substance of their response, of course. But
most of all, he listens for the pronouns they use. Do the workers refer
to the company as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"?
"They" companies and "we" companies, he says, are very different
places.9 And in Motivation 3.0, "we" wins.
Policies
Between the words businesses use and the goals they seek sit the
policies they implement to turn the former into the latter. Here, too,
one can detect the early tremors of a different approach. For example,
many companies in the last decade spent considerable time and
effort crafting corporate ethics guidelines. Yet instances of unethical
behavior don't seem to have declined. Valuable though those guidelines
can be, as a policy they can unintentionally move purposeful
behavior out of the Type I schema and into Type X. As Harvard Business
School professor Max Bazerman has explained:
Say you take people who are motivated to behave nicely, then
give them a fairly weak set of ethical standards to meet. Now,
instead of asking them to "do it because it's the right thing to do," you've essentially given them an alternate set of standards--do this so you can check off all these boxes.
"The value af a life can be measured
by ane's ability to affect the destiny
of one less advantaged. Since death is
an absolute certainty for everyone, the
important variable is the quality of life
one leads between the times of birth
and death."
BILL STRICKLAND
Founder of the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, and MacArthur "genius award" winner
Imagine an organization,
for example, that
believes in affirmative
action--one that wants
to make the world a better
place by creating a
more diverse workforce.
By reducing ethics to
a checklist, suddenly affirmative action is just a bunch of
requirements that the organization must meet to show that it
isn't discriminating.
Now the organization isn't focused on affirmatively pursuing
diversity but rather on making sure that all the boxes are
checked off to show that what it did is OK (and so it won't get
sued). Before, its workers had an intrinsic motivation to do
the right thing, but now they have an extrinsic motivation to
make sure that the company doesn't get sued or fined. 10
In other words, people might meet the minimal ethical standards to
avoid punishment, bur the guidelines have done nothing to inject
purpose into the corporate bloodstream. The better approach could
be to enlist the power of autonomy in the service of purpose maximization.
Two intriguing examples demonstrate what I mean.
First, many psychologists and economists have found that the correlation
between money and happiness is weak-that past a certain
(and quite modest) level, a larger pile of cash doesn't bring people
a higher level of satisfaction. But a few social scientists have begun
adding a bit more nuance to this observation. According to Lara
Aknin and Elizabeth Dunn, sociologists at the University of British
Columbia, and Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business
School, how people spend their money may be at least as important
as how much money they earn. In particular, spending money
on other people (buying flowers for your spouse rather than an MP3
player for yourself) or on a cause (donating to a religious institution
rather than going for an expensive haircut) can actually increase our
subjective well-being. ll In fact, Dunn and Norton propose turning
their findings on what they call "pro-social" spending into corporate
policy. According to The Boston Globe, they believe that "companies
can improve their employees' emotional well-being by shifting some
of their budget for charitable giving so that individual employees are
given sums to donate, leaving them happier even as the charities of
their choice benefit."12 In other words, handing individual employees
control over how the organization gives back to the community
might do more to improve their overall satisfaction than one more
"if-then" financial incentive.
Another study offers a second possible purpose-centered policy
prescription. Physicians in high-profile settings like the Mayo Clinic
face pressures and demands that can often lead to burnout. But field
research at the prestigious medical facility found that letting doctors
spend one day a week on the aspect of their job that was most
meaningful to them-whether patient care, research, or community
service-could reduce the physical and emotional exhaustion that
accompanies their work. Doctors who participated in this trial policy
had half the burnout rate of those who did not. 13 Think of it as "20
percent time" with a purpose.
TH E GOOD LI FE
Each year about thirteen hundred seniors graduate from the University
of Rochester and begin their journey into what many of their
parents and professors like to call the real world. Edward Deci, Richard
Ryan, and their colleague Christopher Niemiec decided to ask
a sample of these soon-to-be graduates about their life goals-and
then to follow up with them early in their careers to see how they
were doing. While much social science research is done with student
volunteers, scientists rarely track students after they've packed up
their diplomas and exited the campus gates. And these researchers
wanted to study the post-college time frame because it represents a
"critical development period that marks people's transitions to their
adult identities and lives."14
Some of the U of R students had what Deci, Ryan, and Niemiec
label "extrinsic aspirations"-for instance, to become wealthy or to
achieve fame-what we might call "profit goals." Others had "intrinsic
aspirations"-to help others improve their lives, to learn, and to
grow--or what we might think of as "purpose goals." After these
students had been out in the real word for between one and two years,
the researchers tracked them down to see how they were faring.
The people who'd had purpose goals and felt they were attaining
them reported higher levels of satisfaction and subjective well-being
than when they were in college, and quite low levels of anxiety and
depression. That's probably no surprise. They'd set a personally
meaningful goal and felt they were reaching it. In that situation,
most of us would likely feel pretty good, too.
But the results for people with profit goals were more complicated.
Those who said they were attaining their goals-accumulating
wealth, winning acclaim reported
levels of satisfaction,
self-esteem, and positive affect
no higher than when they
were students. In other words,
they'd reached their goals,
but it didn't make them any
happier. What's more, graduates with profit goals showed increases in anxiety, depression, and other
negative indicators-again, even though they were attaining their goals.
"One cannot lead 0 life that is truly
excellent without feeling that one belongs
to something greater and more permanent than oneself."
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
"These findings are rather striking," the researchers write, "as
they suggest that attainment of a particular set of goals [in this case,
profit goals} has no impact on well-being and actually contributes to
ill-being."15
When I discussed these results with Deci and Ryan, they were
especially emphatic about their significance-because the findings
suggest that even when we do get what we want, it's not always what
we need. "People who are very high in extrinsic goals for wealth are
more likely to attain that wealth, but they're still unhappy," Ryan told me.
Or as Deci put it, "The typical notion is this: You value something.
You attain it. Then you're better off as a function of it. But
what we find is that there are certain things that if you value and if
you attain them, you're worse off as a result of it, not better off."
Failing to understand this conundrum-that satisfaction depends
not merely on having goals, but on having the right goals-can lead
sensible people down self-destructive paths. If people chase profit
goals, reach those goals, and still don't feel any better about their
lives, one response is to increase the size and scope of the goals-to
seek more money or greater outside validation. And that can "drive
them down a road of further unhappiness thinking it's the road to
happiness," Ryan said.
"One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers
is that they're not having good relationships. They're busy making
money and attending to themselves and that means that there's
less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy
and the things that truly count," Ryan added.
And if the broad contours of these findings are true for individuals,
why shouldn't they also be true for organizations-which, of
course, are collections of individuals? I don't mean to say that profit
doesn't matter. It does. The profit motive has been an important
fuel for achievement. But it's not the only motive. And it's not the
most important one. Indeed, if we were to look at history's greatest
achievements-from the printing press to constitutional democracy
to cures for deadly diseases-the spark that kept the creators working
deep into the night was purpose at least as much as profit. A
healthy society-and healthy business organizations-begins with
purpose and considers profit a way to move toward that end or a
happy by-product of its attainment.
And here the boomers-maybe, just maybe-can take the lead.
On the subjects of autonomy and mastery, adults should look to the
eloquent example of children. But perhaps purpose is another matter.
Being able to contemplate the big picture, to ponder one's own
mortality, to understand the paradox that attaining certain goals isn't
the answer seem to require having spent a few years on the planet.
And since the planet very soon will contain more people over age
sixty-five than under age five for the first time in its existence, the
timing couldn't be better.
It's in our nature to seek purpose. But that nature is now
being revealed and expressed on a scale that is demographically
unprecedented and, until recently, scarcely imaginable. The consequences
could rejuvenate our businesses and remake our world.
A CENTRAL IDEA of this book has been the mismatch between
what science knows and what business does. The gap is wide. Its
existence is alarming. And though closing it seems daunting, we
have reasons to be optimistic.
The scientists who study human motivation, several of whom we've
encountered in this book, offer us a sharper and more accurate account
of both human performance and the human condition. The truths
they've revealed are simple, yet powerful. The science shows that
those typical twentieth-century carrot-and-stick motivators-things
we consider somehow a "natural" part of human enterprise-can
sometimes work. But they're effective in only a surprisingly narrow
band of circumstances. The science shows that "if-then" rewards-the
mainstays of the Motivation 2.0 operating system-not only are ineffective
in many situations, but also can crush the high-level, creative,
conceptual abilities that are central to current and future economic
and social progress. The science shows that the secret to high performance
isn't our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive,
bur our third drive--our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to
extend and expand our abilities, and to live a life of purpose.
Bringing our businesses in sync with these truths won't be easy.
Unlearning old ideas is difficult, undoing old habits even harder.
And I'd be less sanguine abour the prospects of closing the motivation
gap anytime soon, if it weren't for this: The science confirms
what we already know in our hearts.
We know that human beings are not merely smaller, slower, better smelling
horses galloping after that day's carrot. We know-if we've spent time with young children or remember ourselves at our best that we're not destined to be passive and compliant. We're designed
to be active and engaged. And we know that the richest experiences
in our lives aren't when we're clamoring for validation from others,
but when we're listening to our own voice-doing something that
matters, doing it well, and doing it in the service of a cause larger
than ourselves.
So, in the end, repairing the mismatch and bringing our understanding
of motivation into the twenty-first century is more than an
essential move for business. It's an affirmation of our humanity.
