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The Purpose Mindset

It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?

—Henry David Thoreau¹

In 2012, we took thirty executives from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to Kenya as part of an eighteen-month, multisegment leadership development program. Among the sites we visited were clinics and hospitals in Nairobi to expose people to the health care system. We also visited a mobile telephone company and microfinance banks to give executives a broad view of the business landscape. We then traveled to Kisumu, on the shores of Lake Victoria across from Uganda. There we witnessed the dire health care conditions at clinics and in homes. We visited a father and HIV-AIDS patient—a man who had suffered from malaria four times, lived in a mud hut, was hungry and abandoned by his family. He had no way to pay for GSK's anti-retroviral drugs.

One question hit the GSK executives hard: What does it mean to a company like GSK to provide access to health care for somebody in such poverty and privation?

The trip to Kenya stemmed from CEO Andrew Witty's passion for finding better ways to serve people in Africa. Witty was determined to figure out both how to tap Africa's commercial opportunity and how to fulfill GSK's mission to treat patients with illnesses for which GSK sells drugs. Witty saw the commercial potential as huge: Africa has over a billion people and a middle class almost as large as that of the United States. The opportunity to fulfill GSK's mission was just as large: Africa rages with scores of illnesses GSK has worked on, from AIDS to malaria to tuberculosis to many tropical diseases.

Witty faced a paradox: How could GSK make money by providing access for people who have little or no money? How do you respond to the health care need while delivering the premium performance expected of a global corporation? How do you raise stock prices for investors while lowering product prices for the African poor?

In London, Witty and his executive team had grappled with the opposing forces of profit and people, disagreeing about the right way to market products in Kenya and other developing countries. Some understood the moral duty to ease the plight of disadvantaged populations, even though they didn't believe any real commercial opportunities existed in such a poor place. Others argued that the burgeoning middle class offered huge commercial potential. They felt the humanitarian effects were a feel-good by-product.

GSK had not responded up to that time the way many people thought a global drug company should. It had charged top rates for treatments for AIDS drugs, for example, arguing the normal business case that it needed to recoup enough of its investment to reward shareholders and invest in more research. From the business point of view, the pricing was entirely rational. But Witty and others felt the executive team should rethink its approach. His view: “As CEO, I want this company to be a very successful drug company, but not by leaving the population of Africa behind. We need to be a very successful drug company worldwide and be partners with the people of Africa.”²

Witty then changed the discussion. He essentially asked, What if we don't highlight the question of how to profitably run and expand the business? What if we ask instead how to fulfill the company's mission, serving the sick of the world? Mission, not money, after all, gives meaning to the company's work, particularly in the eyes of most employees. Many leaders in business today measure their success in conventional ways: revenue growth, net earnings, margins, and so on. That's what appears on their performance report card, as we noted in the last chapter, so leaders default to this approach. This is true even when executives know full well they are working on a paradox.

But for GSK executives, the trip to Africa was part of treating a paradoxical decision in a different way—by first changing the perception of the decision itself. The perception, as the saying goes, then changes the reality—or more accurately in GSK's case, the shared reality of an entire leadership team. That shared reality, an essential element in collaborating to solve paradoxes, now included the team's memory of seeing a man in a mud hut, dying of AIDS on the shores of Lake Victoria.

It turns out that you can change the reality of a decision-making process with the purpose mindset. With this new outlook, you can succeed not just according to conventional business norms but also by fulfilling your aspirations to make the world better. As the GSK executives learned, the purpose mindset spurs a discussion that takes people down pathways of entirely new logic—and discussions that for these executives extended to four sessions over eighteen months. These discussions in turn led to dramatic changes in the way the executives think about solving the paradox of providing care in developing countries. Just one of the solutions GSK came up with was selling AIDS and other patented drugs at no more than 25 percent of the developed-world price in the world's forty-nine poorest nations. GSK abandoned the idea of consistent pricing the world over—which obviously reflected a puzzle-solving mentality. Instead, it adopted a policy of flexibility, a purpose-driven solution to an age-old paradox.

What Is a Mindset?

When we talk about mindset, what do we mean? In simple terms, we mean a point of view, a perspective, a lens that narrows the focus to a specific field of concern. The mindset defines the problem's scope—bordered by a frame, constrained by givens, and characterized by assumptions and values. When you change the frame, assumptions, givens, or values, you change the decision—as well as the discussion process behind it.

Flipping the switch on a mindset throws fresh light on the most attractive actions to address a paradox. The advantages of this fresh light are hard to overstate. We all know this from personal experience, of course. Say you are deciding which partner to invite to a summer barbecue. Who would you choose to impress your friends? Who would you favor if you needed to bring someone home to meet Mom? And who would make the best candidate if you were courting a companion to help paint your house? Your mindset creates the tracks for your reasoning. The tracks route you toward a solution.

In business, most leaders fail to clarify their perception of reality. To be sure, they look at decisions from different points of view, but they usually do so in an off-the-cuff, inadvertent, or even unconscious way. They drive down a set of tracks pretty much the same every time: state the business goals, analyze the situation, generate alternatives, articulate criteria for success, research uncertainties, evaluate by trading off pluses and minuses, pinpoint the best solution. This is the script leaders have learned—we all have learned—and we rarely question it.

This form of decision making suits puzzles that have fixed, definitive answers. As we've said before, this is an invaluable start on problem solving. But in today's complex world, filled with paradoxical problems, you need to adapt the process to accommodate irreconcilable tensions and impermanent solutions. You want to methodically—consciously—guide your people with explicit mindsets. If you do so, you help people start to collaborate from common ground in an atmosphere otherwise characterized by utter ambiguity.

How do you construct a mindset? It takes four tactics: posing an essential question, reframing, clarifying assumptions or constraints, and highlighting values. Together, these four approaches steer your mind—and the mind of your collaborators—out of old ruts and onto fresh ground. If you're a leader initiating the mindset, a variation of an old saying is worth heeding: “A healthy mindset is contagious—but don't wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier.”

Essential Questions

The notion of an essential question is akin to the concept in education, in which students are asked to explore a question posing basic, deep, and difficult-to-answer queries. An essential question begs for fresh analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of ideas. By nature, it gets at an issue without a right answer, an issue that recurs throughout work or life, that often cuts across fields of thought, that demands advice from new experts. For example, an educator might ask: “Is it acceptable to clone human beings?”

The essential question related to paradox is not something you take off the shelf. You have to invent it, because the paradox at hand simply has no pat or replicable answer. Consider one paradox we all live with: work versus personal life. If you're a young, ambitious leader with loads of career potential, you will naturally lean toward favoring work even as you remain engaged with family. If you're in a later stage of career, you may favor family and challenges outside of work. Many leaders turn down promotions to spend more time with their adolescent children.

As we all know, the idea of balancing work and life can seem like a pipe dream—unless we change the essential question. So we ask: What is the real purpose that motivates most of us to seek balance? And many of us will have a similar answer: To live a meaningful life. So we have a new essential question indicative of our new mindset: How do I live a meaningful life?

If we change the essential question in this way, we will then face a related question: “What does success look like?” In the case of GSK, it looks like something much broader than business health. It includes population health in the markets GSK serves. The answer to that question drives any number of actions.

GSK executives responded to the question with a number of commitments. Three examples:

• Vanquish malaria, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, with multiple strategies, including development of a vaccine, now in Phase III trials.
• Increase access to GSK's HIV medicines to help the World Health Organization and UNAIDS achieve their goal of reaching 15 million people globally with antiretroviral treatment by 2015.
• Help eliminate ten neglected tropical diseases by 2020, including lymphatic filariasis (which causes elephantiasis, river blindness, and other maladies).³

Framing the Paradox

The essential question kicks off the process of framing, or putting boundaries around, the paradox demanding attention. By framing, you designate some aspects of a problem for a place at center stage, others a place at the wings, still others at back stage or in the alley outside. Or as in Monopoly, you focus all your investments on one street and ignore the rest. Or as in politics, you focus on one slate of issues, like security (energy, food), while setting aside others, like economic stimulus (energy subsidies, price supports). Some concerns stay on the surface to insist on attention; others remain submerged.

In some ways, we have been writing about framing in this book from the start. Our first act of framing was to change our approach to complex problems, reframing puzzles as paradoxes. The paradox frame assumes the problem does not have one best answer, and that any answer will not last forever (or even very long) and will not please everyone. This is a difficult frame to conceptualize. It ranks among the hardest to see and deploy effectively, and so we give it so much attention.

When you customize a paradox frame with a purpose perspective, you highlight some form of “taking the high road.” Think about moving your gaze from a narrow, small-world view to a broader, big-world perspective. As with Google Earth, instead of zooming in to focus on your neighborhood, zoom out to focus on the planet. GSK resized its frame to help people confronting its disease specialties in forty-nine developing countries.⁴ That's a big frame, and it raises the issue of how big a frame for a purpose mindset should be? The rule is that, when faced with a paradox with any mindset, the frame should accommodate both ends of the opposing forces creating the paradox—in GSK's case, conventional business success on one end and universal health care access on the other.

Executives in other industries face different forces, but they can accommodate the same breadth. Leaders in the financial services industry, after their sometimes embarrassing role in bringing the world to the point of financial breakdown, have done a lot of rethinking about the paradoxes they face. On July 5, 2012, John Taft, CEO of RBC Wealth Management, observed in HBR Blog, “The financial system has become disconnected from its larger social role and purpose, which is to serve as a means to greater ends, helping bridge the gap between the needs of savers (investors) and the needs of users of capital (business, governments, not-for-profit agencies) and efficiently allocating capital and promoting economic growth.”⁵

Many leaders in financial services have taken a broader frame. The president of the CFA Institute, John Rogers, writes: “The next generation of leaders in finance will be defined not by the amount of money they amass, but by the stewardship they exercise as fiduciaries and the responsibility they demonstrate to their communities.” Interestingly, we have often seen that reframing gives a lot of relief to leaders, who suddenly see out of the darkness of an inscrutable problem to a well-lit avenue for advancing toward a solution. Further, they don't feel so squeezed by other people's expectations that they get control of the issue, get a consistent answer, and get closure.

Clarifying the Assumptions or Constraints

The frame that you choose invariably comes with a lot of baggage. When you decide what's in, what's out, and what's on the edges, you need to make your thinking explicit. What time scale are you considering? How much risk are you taking? How much money are you putting on the line? What kinds of manpower will you need to take action? Above all, what value are you assuming you're adding for customers, employees, shareholders, and the world? And finally, how are you contributing to something beyond yourself—along that high road?

By answering all these questions, you can determine the best frame. The experience of Rogers, like that of Andrew Witty at GSK, suggests that the task for leaders is to reflect on multiple frames and choose the one that best fits.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, explained that, after 2008, while his company was trying to absorb two major acquisitions, his organization “lost sight of what we're trying to do.” The challenge of managing short-term integration of two acquisitions while building a global franchise during unparalleled economic turbulence caused many people to lose focus. Fink said they had to remind themselves why they were in business—to meet the performance expectations of clients. This higher purpose guided the company's decisions about everything—investments, product development, promotions, organizational structure, and governance. Seeing major decisions through the lens of the client helped the company manage the delicate balance of short-term results and longer-term growth.

Part of this process is surfacing assumptions about what aspects within the scope of the paradox are not currently amenable to change. What can leaders control? What can they not control? What decisions have you made already that you cannot change? What decisions will you defer to the future as outside the scope of the present paradox? Many leaders must accept the context in which they are leading: the competitive playing field around them, the history and culture of the organization they lead, the performance expectations of investors, bosses, or peers. GSK, for example, took as a given that it would only pursue profitable business. If the executives had gone to the other extreme, they could easily have said, “We need to fund a charity to give away aid.” In the end, they did accept lower financial returns of only 25 percent in developing countries, but they would not accept losing money in their business.

Assumptions about how much to loosen control are often those that will give you most trouble. To jump over the line, you will have to loosen your grip on any number of things, and you will want to make these things explicit. For example, you may act more transparently—giving more information out to the public and employees, as did Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. But you cannot share everything willy-nilly. You will have to draw the line, say, on sharing trade secrets, client information, and disclosures as required by regulatory bodies. This requires rethinking “the way things are done around here.”

Highlighting the Values

Another part of clarifying a purpose mindset is itemizing values. In some cases, this is just a matter of affirming or reconfirming your company's stated values. In others, you may want to work with others to flesh out the meaning of values. Or you might clarify what the values look like in action, a critical objective of the GSK executives' trip to Kenya. For GSK, the trip provoked a head, heart, and guts leadership experience. The executives' hearts were moved by the firsthand experience of overwhelming suffering; their heads reminded them of the imperative of business performance; and their guts left them resolved to take action.

To be sure, the GSK trip only deepened the inherent paradox—nobody could ignore the demand to respond to each of the many opposing forces. But their common experience allowed them to recognize the rightness of various positions—long term and short term, global and local, profit and people. And that rightness stemmed from viscerally feeling the impact of opposing values. Upon returning from Kenya, the GSK executives found fresh common ground in values of patient access and community responsibility.

When executives go through such exercises, they often experience the “values paradox.” The stated values of the organization turn out to drive as many paradoxes as resolve them. Consider Patagonia, the clothing company. Its mission statement implies a range of paradoxes, especially the paradox of increasing sales for economic good while creating consumption that leads to environmental harm: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” That has prompted Patagonia to take counterintuitive actions. On one Black Friday, when other retailers promoted low prices and high consumption, Patagonia reversed course. It urged customers to “not buy from us what you don't need or can't really use. Everything we make—everything anyone makes—costs the planet more than it gives back.”

One of the values many organizations struggle with today is engagement—the commitment to give people room to find meaningful work. Engagement stimulates commitment and generates energy for action. We have worked with one company where senior leaders decided that annual performance reviews were suffocating engagement. When supervisors annually subject people to evaluations, ranking them like grades of beef, people feel someone else has overweening control. The leaders at this company decided to dump the annual performance review and replace it with quarterly checkups that give people feedback and encourage growth. True, the leaders sacrificed the whip of control, but they unleashed the energy arising from intrinsic motivation.

Purpose-Driven Decisions

When you use the purpose mindset, you are not engaging in business problem solving as usual. True, you go through the same steps—analyzing the situation, framing, generating alternatives, and so on—but you have to adapt them. Four factors differentiate problem solving with a purpose mindset from conventional decision making: aligning your personal purpose with the organizational one, elevating the frame for the decision to an unusually high level, engaging in ongoing debate about the frame, and motivating people to debate based on inspiration rather than information.

Your Personal Purpose

Even before starting on the decision-making process, leaders guiding a discussion based on a purpose mindset need to examine their own purpose. Ultimately, your personal and organizational purposes need to line up. Otherwise, you will find your work untenable. We once dealt with an executive we'll call Deborah. She worked for a big company that made food and beverage products, some of which contained high amounts of fat, sugar, and preservatives. As she became more aware of obesity among young boys and girls—and saw the same in her children and friends—she found it hard to reconcile her corporate and parental roles. She simply didn't agree with her company's dismissal of a major health problem.

Deborah at first thought of resigning, but after reflection and coaching, she decided to take a different tack. Although her company wasn't taking a stand for societal health, it did treat employees fairly, helped them develop, and embraced diversity, especially for women. The company allowed her to grow in an environment more open than those at many other socially conscious companies. She decided to stay with the company, and she began to find ways to speak up about obesity, in particular calling on the company to play a role in producing healthy alternative choices for children. Over time, other executives began to agree, and we can speculate that the company will eventually face up to managing the same paradox faced by Pepsi—healthy food versus a healthy bottom line.

For most people, the story they tell themselves and others about their lives has several parts: work, play, community, and so on. But all the parts have the same themes, represent the same values, go in the same direction. Otherwise, people can't persist with their story—or they have to rewrite it. Defining your purpose is a prerequisite to defining your organization's purpose. You may be unclear how to define your values and beliefs. Or you may think that because of your industry, or the products and services your company produces, you may not have a purpose in the workplace. You may struggle to apply your larger mission to the paradoxes you face daily, as Deborah did. Still, a complete leader makes an effort at alignment so that the problem solving for paradoxes proceeds smoothly.

Richard Leider has written eloquently about the importance of purpose in leading others. He offers questions to clarify why you work and what values you choose:⁶

• What matters most in your life?
• What in life gives you a feeling of satisfaction, inspiration, joy, or openness?
• What do you think the meaning or purpose of your life is?
• Does your life reflect these beliefs and values?
• What keeps you from living your life purpose or being “in the moment”?
• How do you serve or contribute?
• Who are the mentors, teachers, and role models in your life?
• What prevents you from spending your time or high-quality time on the things that matter most to you?

Leider has also developed a Working on Purpose questionnaire to help assess how aligned your life is with a sense of purpose:⁷

• Do I wake up most Monday mornings feeling energized to go to work?
• Do I have deep energy—feel a personal calling—for my work?
• Am I clear about how I measure my success as a person?
• Do I use my gifts to add real value to people's lives?
• Do I work with people who honor the values I value?
• Can I speak my truth in my work?
• Am I experiencing true joy in my work?
• Am I making a living doing what I most love to do?
• Can I speak my purpose in one clear sentence?
• Do I go to sleep most nights feeling “this was a well-lived day”?
• Do I work with others who share my purpose?

Debating the Purpose-Driven Frame

Any purpose-driven personal life is one of struggle. The same goes for purpose-driven organizational life. When you enlarge or elevate the frame of your decisions to include purpose, you cannot expect to close the discussion after a few meetings. You have to leave it open—open not just because you face a paradoxical problem you will have to revisit, but open because wrestling with your personal or organizational purpose evolves with the times and circumstances. No right solution will remain right as you develop into a more mature leader. No closure is possible.

That brings up another factor differentiating purpose-driven problem solving from conventional organizational decision making: the need to spur an ongoing debate. Johnson & Johnson, like GSK, has not shied away from the issue of access to medicine versus the need to maintain profit margins and shareholder returns. CEO Alex Gorsky and his executive committee acknowledge the importance of the paradox. Some observers might think that Johnson & Johnson's storied Credo would resolve the debate by encouraging access. The credo starts: “We believe our first responsibility is to the doctors, nurses, and patients, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.”⁸

But Johnson & Johnson also takes responsibility for responding to three other stakeholders: employees, communities, and shareholders. Gorsky encourages an ongoing discussion of how the Credo directs company action. The J&J credo gives leaders the permission and space to talk freely without worrying about being deemed either crassly materialistic or naively altruistic. The debate in turn develops leaders who think and reason, constantly restoring and refreshing alignment between the credo and the company's decision making. It also allows the company to recalibrate its approach continuously, adjusting its decision making to fit the needs of a given decision at a given moment in time.

Gorsky often refers to the inherent conflicts embedded in the J&J Credo. He encourages his leaders to acknowledge this inherent paradox and, rather than avoid it, use the Credo to foster discussion, debate, and resolution about what action to take. He believes that having an overarching sense of purpose is critical for leaders attempting to resolve paradox today.

The leaders of today's organizations are not the only ones who have to define and communicate company purpose. The same requirement exists for all of us who hope to lead others during periods of rapid change in business models, markets, and technology. The world may be volatile and business may evolve continuously, but you need to ask: What is my raison d'être? As a manager and as a leader, what do you hope to accomplish? Why does it matter to the people following you?

Motivate Purpose by Inspiring

In these cynical times, inspiration may seem like an archaic leadership concept. But if any behavior distinguishes the approach of leaders who solve problems with the purpose mindset, it is appealing to people's hunger to have someone raise them to a higher level. You do not have to be a motivational speaker to make this happen. GSK did it with its trip to Kenya. No executive finished that trip without new resolve to make a difference in the developing world.

At Avon, leaders bring representatives from different parts of the world to speak at major management events. Some of these representatives come from humble beginnings, such as the favelas of Sâo Paolo, and they speak movingly about how the money they earned through Avon helped them. They used the money to raise their families and achieve security that would have been impossible otherwise. This helps bring Avon's slogan—“a company for women”—to life. It enables leaders in corporate headquarters to see firsthand that they aren't working just to generate profits for the business. They are enabling hundreds of thousands of representatives to make a decent living.

At Johnson & Johnson, the company ended a three-day management meeting with a visit from a prostate cancer patient. The patient explained how he had received a terminal diagnosis. He had deteriorated to the point that he began the process of saying good-bye to his family when, for one last attempt at a cure, he entered an experimental trial with Zytiga, a new J&J compound that in his case had the effect of dramatically reducing the prostate cancer tumor. His PSA levels nosedived, his cancer went into remission, and his doctor told him, “You're going to die of something eventually, but it won't be prostate cancer.”

As the patient told his story and expressed his gratitude for J&J, its people, and its products, there was not a dry eye among the 150 J&J leaders. They had come to the meeting to discuss strategy and metrics. But the cancer victim's visit elevated the conversation. The internecine debates about functions, business plans, and growth targets felt petty in comparison.

At times, executive teams can struggle in taking a purpose mindset. The purpose seems awfully abstract when considered by a group of affluent executives in a sterile conference room. By nature, people feel removed from its immediacy. To gain the full power of the mindset, you have to animate the room in some way. This is a time when engaging the intellect is inadequate. The head and the heart have to work together to change the conversation.

How do you know if you're succeeding? Complete leaders naturally loosen their attachment to control, consistency, and closure. They naturally set aside the organizational obstacles that have kept them from collaborating. They naturally embrace and seek to realize their own purpose and live the organization's higher values. They see that, although they may be accused of making the wrong decision, they must still act. And they must act today—even if they face ambiguous circumstances, even if the outcome is uncertain—with the knowledge that they must revisit the paradox and consider new actions tomorrow.

Toward Higher Purpose

The purpose mindset has long served as a powerful means to solve paradox. But in recent years, companies have gone further than before in highlighting purpose as a cause for action. The public and employees have demanded it, and if you're a leader you know that when you carefully define corporate purposes, you differentiate yourself from competitors. Complete leaders now heed the power of purpose statements, backed by actions across the company, in solving paradoxes that once seemed inscrutable.

John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods, once observed “We have not achieved our tremendous increase in shareholder value by making shareholder value the only purpose of our business.”⁹ Obviously, companies must remain profit-driven, but making money is no longer enough; it's necessary but not sufficient. Consumers and employees want to connect with a company's commitment to a much broader agenda. Whole Foods' stated mission begins, “We believe that companies, like individuals, must assume their share of responsibility as tenants of Planet Earth.”¹⁰

The legitimization of using a purpose to drive decision making received an extra push, ironically, from the 2008 financial panic. Thereafter, the Harvard Business School Class of 2009 created a new MBA oath, in view of its perception that the panic had partially resulted from leaders with too limited a view of their moral and ethical responsibility. Two hundred fifty business schools and universities and hundreds of thousands of Millennial MBAs have now signed the oath as an expression of their values in taking positions of leadership in societies throughout the world.

For those signing it, the oath pledges that they will work on behalf of society rather than narrow personal interests, that they will act ethically and responsibly in all they do, and that they will be conscious of the needs of future generations when making present-day decisions. To illustrate, one part of the oath reads, “I will strive to create sustainable economic, social, and environmental prosperity worldwide.”¹¹

The fact that thousands of next-generation leaders have accepted this mindset as their view of leadership is an important development in reinventing the role of today's corporation in society. It means the generation of new managers will take on a new responsibility: managing the ongoing paradox of achieving business results while acting in accordance with the values of society and the communities in which their companies operate. Leaders like those in the HBS Class of 2009 who believe in something—and who work with a sense of purpose and values—promise to confront today's world of ambiguity and complexity with greater success.

The trend toward higher purpose also received an extra push from the growing discussion in mainstream business circles of what is called “Capitalism 2.0”—or the practicing of capitalism in a way that goes beyond just making a profit. This position has been articulated forcefully by Michael Porter, Harvard Business School guru of business strategy for the last twenty years. In “Creating Shared Value: How to Reinvent Capitalism . . . and Unleash a Wave of Innovation and Growth,” Porter and co-author Mark R. Kramer advocate an alternative to traditional corporate capitalism that combines social and community involvement with the pursuit of profit.¹²

Because of this focus on purpose, we found in our interviews that leaders are thinking about the issue a lot more and developing their own organizational and individual definitions of what constitutes meaning. Purpose varies based on factors such as personal values, industry, and country. Here are a few company purposes that we consider noteworthy. They elevate the purpose of the corporation, and in turn allow leaders to readily elevate decision-making discussions about paradoxical problems.

• At BlackRock, the world's premier asset management firm, employees are clear that their purpose is not just to make money, it is also to ensure the financial well-being of those who invest in their portfolio of funds, including teachers, firemen, and labor unions.
• At Starbucks, the purpose is “serving humanity.” As founder Howard Schultz says, “We are a performance-driven organization but we have to lead the company through the lens of humanity.”¹³ When a large institutional shareholder asked Schultz to cut health care benefits, he refused, saying the essence of the brand is humanity, which necessitates providing health care to employees.
• At Unilever, CEO Paul Polman notes: “Our purpose is to have a sustainable business model that is put at the service of the greater good.” Unilever is tackling global problems like climate change, disease, and poverty.¹⁴
• At Dow, the purpose is simple: To constantly improve what is essential to human progress by mastering science and technology.
• At Nike, the company exists to bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
• At Colgate-Palmolive, the emphasis is on creating high-quality oral hygiene products for consumers while providing an opportunity for employees and their families to make good incomes and live comfortable lifestyles.
• At PepsiCo, CEO Indra Nooyi uses the phrase “performance with purpose” to describe the company's dedication to both great results and social responsibility.

What makes a purpose strong and noteworthy? In teaching leaders about how to manage paradox, we frequently begin with the basic question, What are you trying to achieve and why? Failure to answer that question at the most basic human level—a level that speaks to the head and heart of every employee—hampers the ability to manage paradox.

We suggest you keep three words in mind that sum up what we've covered so far: clear, conscious, and coordinated. Clear because the crisper the purpose, the sharper your picture of where you're going—even if you don't know how to get there. Conscious because clarifying a purpose once isn't enough. Put it in a formal document, but create regular reminders to bring it to life through actions, decisions, and behaviors that people remember. Coordinated because you want to align your personal and organizational purposes. If you do not, you will encounter conflicts with no-win results, being neither true to your company nor yourself—the situation that Deborah initially faced.

A Final Note

One of the great benefits of a purposeful mindset is that it's energizing. When you know why you're doing what you're doing, you're plugged into a power source. It doesn't make a choice any less difficult, but it provides you with the sense that you're doing the right thing. This adds to the inspiration that comes from visits to customers like the GSK trip to Kenya, from visits to the United States by Avon reps from Sâo Paulo, from visits by customers like the prostate cancer survivor at J&J. The purpose mindset gives you energy to manage a paradox in spite of its difficulty.

In working with senior executives of financial service firms, we often invite an outside speaker who has experienced significant disruption or even public failure to discuss how to learn from difficult experiences and manage hubris. One speaker we invited is Joe Beradino, formerly CEO of the now defunct accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Beradino spoke wisely of his many lessons, but we believe he put his finger on the essence of developing a purpose mindset when he said that as a leader he often relies on three questions to help him navigate difficult situations:

• Who are you?
• Whose are you?
• Who are you called to become?

The first question calls for self-awareness and the third question for a vision of your direction as a leader. The second question is the challenging one: who do you work for? Answers range from the CEO to my family to a higher power to the customer. It gets to the key issue of purpose: who or what do you really serve?

That question can often open up a broad new discussion about the ways to solve a paradox. That's of course what happened with the GSK executives on our trip to Kenya. And that's why GSK has since committed to expanding access to GSK medicines and vaccines for around 800 million people in developing countries. This includes the regions where GSK will sell its patented medicines at no more than 25 percent of developed world prices and reinvest 20 percent of profits back into local health care infrastructure projects.

This is the power of changing perception, or shared reality. GSK is now doing things it would never have done before. It practices flexible pricing. It has established a separate business unit responsible for increasing patient access to its drugs in the poorest countries. It has partnered with nonprofit groups like Save the Children and CARE to help ease the shortage of trained frontline health care workers. By jumping over the line to recognize paradox, and by taking a purpose mindset, leaders at GSK have refashioned the model of a leading global drug company.

The purpose mindset, however, offers the complete leader just one avenue to change perception and in turn change reality. Despite its value, it sometimes fails to highlight the relevant issues, especially when those issues relate to conventional business operations. You may then get better results by using or adding the reconciliation mindset, to which we turn in the next chapter. If purpose redirects people to the high road, reconciliation calls attention to fresh solutions along the road we must travel day by day.