On purpose
Self-actualisation is not the answer to fulfilment; it is self-transcendence that businesses and individuals should aim for
by Tom Rippin @OnPurposeUK
Over the past couple of decades, purpose has been elevated to the highest level of discourse in private sector business. Its new-found currency is cause for celebration, but also caution. We imbue purpose with moral merit, but we often side-step the dilemmas it exposes. We want to have our cake and eat it. In its 2016 People on a Mission report, management consultancy Korn Ferry stated: “Doing good means doing well”; management literature is strewn with paeans to purpose of similar persuasion. At On Purpose, the company I established in 2010, we help people and organisations find their professional purpose. Our one-year, full-time programme helps emerging leaders switch to a more purposive career; the programme not only builds skills and experience, but also facilitates deep, values-based change. Describing this change is challenging, as it emerges from a mix of dedicating time, contemplation, immersion in a new community and a true sense of belonging to something greater than yourself. We do not believe in shortcuts to purpose.
The highest good
In the fourth century BCE, Aristotle grappled long and hard with the “highest good”, as he called it. This, he contended, had three characteristics: it is desirable for itself, it is not desirable for the sake of any other good and all other goods are in service of it.
The first hurdle at which so much of our discourse falls is the need to justify purpose with (sometimes conflicting) benefits, whether this is shareholder returns, employee retention or customer loyalty. This betrays a mind trapped in the false promises of 20th.century economics. If you are making a business case for purpose you have fundamentally misunderstood what purpose is about. You must take purpose for what it is, not for what it can do for you. Purpose has no ‘why’; it is the ‘why’
Some 2,000 years after Aristotle, Viktor Frankl, the Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, brought his experience to bear on understanding purpose. For Frankl, purpose was not about self-actualisation (as his contemporary, US psychologist Abraham Maslow, set out in his famous hierarchy of needs), it was about having a cause to serve or another person to love. It was about having something that took you beyond yourself, which Frankl termed self-transcendence. His insight went further: self-actualisation is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more you strive for it, the less likely it is that it will occur. Self-actualisation is only ever a side-effect of self-transcendence. This is worth repeating: the more you strive for fulfilment, the less likely it is you will achieve it; the more you focus beyond yourself, the more likely you will be fulfilled.
But how does this apply to organisations? The first sober truth comes from Aristotle: organisational purpose and profit need not correlate. Win-wins will not save the world. True purpose exposes the trade-offs we must face. The measure of true leadership is how we navigate them.
The second truth is that we need to understand organisational self-transcendence. What lies beyond the organisation; for what should organisations strive? Stakeholder wellbeing? Should employees, shareholders, customers and suppliers be prioritised? This, though, is transcendence limited to your extended family.
The mature approach to organisational self-transcendence is to understand that beyond every organisation lie the systems in which it is embedded
– its ecosystems — and an organisation’s purpose is to play its part in keeping these ecosystems healthy. Just as every cell in your body plays its part in keeping you alive and well, every organisation needs to play its part in generating and sustaining the health of the communities, industries, economies, societies and the planet of which it is part.
Some organisations have already come to this realisation. Interface (a global carpet manufacturer) and Microsoft, for example, have recognised the need not just to avoid harming the environment but to help regenerate it. Interface has committed that “it’s no longer enough to limit the damage we do. […] We want to restore our planet and leave a positive impact.” Microsoft recently pledged that by 2050 it will have removed more carbon from the atmosphere (and will presumably continue to do so) than it will have caused since its founding in 1975.
Evolving the economy
Focusing on self-transcendence changes everything because it means that how we measure success changes on every level — from the individual to the organisation and the wider economy — and therefore so do our solutions. These inter-dependent changes constitute nothing less than a paradigm shift.
Bringing about a purposive economy is easily said but will be difficult to do, not least because most organisations are currently conditioned to self-actualise. Some do so in relatively innocuous ways — I am sceptical, for instance, of Hatchimals’ contribution to global wellbeing — and maybe we can afford some of these. Some face genuine dilemmas. I’m sure agrichemical companies genuinely believe that we cannot feed the world without pesticides, but the planet’s boundary for reactive nitrogen has already been overshot; in these situations we will need radical changes to business models and whole value chains. Some companies knowingly harm others for profit; I doubt that even tobacco firms themselves believe they have a net positive impact on the world. In these instances, we will need to evolve our economy so that this is no longer possible. It can feel like bringing about an economy of self-transcendence in the time we need to is impossible. But if we put in a fraction of the effort we have spent on building a self-actualising economy, change will happen more quickly than we think possible.
Tom Rippin FRSA is the founder and CEO of On Purpose and is a Trustee of Global Action Plan
