Then—at some point in their lives—they don’t. What happens?
“You start to get ashamed that what you’re doing is childish,” Csikszentmihalyi explained.
What a mistake. Perhaps you and I—and all the other adults in charge of things—are the ones who are immature. It goes back to Csikszentmihalyi’s experience on the train, wondering how grown-ups could have gotten things so wrong. Our circumstances may be less dire, but the observation is no less acute. Left to their own devices, Csikszentmihalyi says, children seek out flow with the inevitability of a natural law. So should we all.
CHAPTER 6
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.1 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.2 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 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.”
“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 LEDERHAUSEN
Investor and former
McDonald’s executive
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 Mondragón Corporación 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 of a life can be measured by one’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, but 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.11 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.