FOUR

In Good Company

The Spectrum of Purpose

Imagine a world

in which more office workers are motivated by a sense of purpose and meaning. Money and personal needs will still be part of this spectrum (particularly until you reach basic levels of safety and sustenance), but the higher ground will be meaningful work. People will understand the wisdom of purpose—as well as its business value. Leaders especially will be very mindful about personal and organizational intentions, sense of purpose, and clarity of direction.

Sharing Navigational Stars
Illustration by Katia Herrera from the Dominican Republic. After reading this chapter, consider how you might illustrate your story about the Spectrum of Purpose.

Purpose is all about intentions. To be “in good company” is to work with people you like and respect, people who give you a sense of well-being and purpose. When in good company, people from diverse backgrounds all have a sense of belonging. Good companies are those who treat their workers well.

What was initially called The Great Resignation, where many people quit their jobs instead of returning after the COVID-19 shutdown, was a signal that many people do not believe that they are in good company. What looked like an antiwork sentiment, was much deeper. As Beyoncé’s hit single of 2022 “Break My Soul” describes, resignation was a rejection of dehumanizing, boring, or destructive work.¹ It was a search for more meaningful work and life.

FIGURE 8:
Spectrum of Purpose

In 2020 when office workers were asked suddenly to stay home for the safety of themselves and others, many people began rethinking their lives. With no commuting and no activities outside of the home, some people were able to engage in activities that they loved. Some explored new hobbies. Many had extra time and space to reflect on work and life. Some people began asking themselves big questions like, Is my work meaningful to me? What brings me joy? What is my responsibility to others? Who are the people that I value most? Does my work allow me to contribute to something greater than myself?

Of course, asking such questions was a luxury that many could not afford because they didn’t have a decent job or a decent place to work at home. Many people had childcare or elder care responsibilities that made the COVID-19 office shutdowns extra difficult.

The spectrum of choices for purpose on the mixing board is visualized as in figure 8. The word purpose can be interpreted in many ways. Usually, purpose is the reason for which something is done. On the Spectrum of Purpose, we are asking: what is your intention?

The Spectrum of Purpose ranges from personal to collective, individual needs to societal needs. Office shock is fueling a shift from work as what we do to make money, to work as something transcendent, something we do that is connected to our larger goals and values. Purpose-driven people have resolve: their intentions are clear.

Hierarchy of Needs Reimagined

In 2020, psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman reconceptualized Abraham Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs² in a new book called Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization.³ Kaufman concluded that Maslow never intended his work to be depicted as a rigid pyramid. Instead, Kaufman’s interpretation uses the metaphor of a sailboat floating on the choppy seas of life. Kaufman describes the hull of the boat as made up of the security dimensions of safety, connection, and self-esteem. Each of us can sail in our own direction, and the boat protects us from the dangers of the sea swelling around us. Kaufman emphasizes that life is not like climbing a pyramid on solid ground, life is more like opening a sail in the wind, a sail that is made up of the growth dimensions of exploration, love, and purpose.

Kaufman concludes with Maslow’s final paper called Theory Z, where he argues that healthy people evolve their priorities from beyond themselves as they age. Kaufman writes:

Maslow proposed that “transcenders” are [motivated] by higher ideals and values that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs in the fulfillment of one’s unique self. These meta-motivations include a devotion to a calling outside oneself . . . , to go beyond and above self-fulfillment to self-actualization. Seeking purpose is a legitimate and important human aspiration.⁴

Having purpose requires transcendence beyond your isolated self. Maslow suggested thirty-five conceptualizations of the word transcendence, while Kaufman offers twenty-four alternate descriptions.⁵ The fact that transcendence is described by these two thoughtful writers using fifty-nine different words—most of them linked to purpose—suggests that purpose is both very important and very difficult to describe.

Purpose is expressed externally as the reason for doing something and can even have a set of metrics to determine its success. Purpose provides a bond with an office or a community. Purpose is a shared intent, and it can be very motivational. Meaning, on the other hand, is experienced internally and with emotions. People need both purpose and meaning. The best organizations have an explicit purpose and an officing experience that provides a sense of emotional meaning.

The Neuroscience of Purpose

In her work as CEO and chief happiness officer of Delivering Happiness, a company redesigning workplace organization around positive psychology, Jenn Lim found individuals who both do purpose-driven work and operate with a sense of purpose linked to helping others and improving broader society were most likely to be happy with their work.⁶

The brain chemistry underlying these motivations is our catalyst for change. Change starts in the brain, in an essential activity called neuroplasticity. First postulated in the late 1800s, and empirically seen every day in thousands of brain scans across the globe, neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to adapt and learn. The brain grows by creating synapses (connections between neurons) in response to experience.⁷ Neuroplasticity describes the changes in nerve pathways to adapt to changes in experience. It is brain chemistry that underlies the brain’s ability to adapt and learn from experience. As the neuropsychologist Donald Hebb said: “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”⁸

Neuroplasticity powers the search for purpose. Seeking a better future accelerates finding purpose. When the search happens with others, purpose is amplified significantly because it is now firing in what the American psychologist Louis Cozolino refers to as the “social synapse”—neurological clusters we have in common with other people.⁹

Experiences that trigger neuroplasticity for both the individual and the collective have powerful effects. This search for meaning can be so strong that it can enable humans to overcome physical hardships. Our brains must grow.

People tend to be motivated by the hope of future rewards. Columnist David Brooks discussed unrealized hope in describing the new culture wars around the world:

Human beings are powerfully driven by what are known as thymotic desires. These are the needs to be seen, respected, appreciated. If you give people the impression that they are unseen, disrespected and unappreciated, they will become enraged, resentful, and vengeful. They will perceive diminishment as injustice and respond with aggressive indignation.¹⁰

Having a sense of purpose is motivating but being denied your sense of purpose is deeply threatening. Also, it is one thing to have a strong sense of purpose that makes you feel that you are right. It is quite another thing to have a strong purpose with a belief that others are wrong.

Writing about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, Wall Street Journal investigative journalist John Carreyrou said:

Her father had drilled into her the notion that she should live a purposeful life. . . . The message Elizabeth took away from them [her parents] is that if she wanted to truly leave her mark on the world, she would need to accomplish something that furthered the greater good, not just become rich.¹¹

Elizabeth Holmes said she had a sense of purpose, but she also lied to investors and patients. She was convicted of fraud. Purpose is a powerful motivator, but not always for good.

Living a purpose-driven life has direct positive effects on your brain. Dopamine is released in your brain to motivate you to do things you need or enjoy, such as painting a picture, reading a good book, or dancing. Praise increases dopamine levels. Knowing a reward is possible stimulates the release of dopamine to achieve the reward, to achieve the sensation of satisfaction (associated with other neurotransmitters). Fulfilling the essentials of life—exercise, food, and sex—all stimulate the release of dopamine.

In her book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence,¹² psychiatrist Anna Lembke documents how dopamine levels influence the balance between pleasure and pain in the brain. In the noisy present, addictive behaviors—not just to drugs and alcohol, but also to food, sex, and smartphones—happen because we overindulge, raising the levels of dopamine to beyond what we need, causing the imbalances of addiction.

Aspiration for a better future is a powerful trigger for dopamine, which empowers the brain and body to move toward that better world and adapt along the way. Dopamine drives us to find balance. It encourages us to find the good feelings of serotonin, which regulates mood and other cognitive functions, after doing something that was dopamine driven.

Finding purpose is creating harmony between our individual need for dopamine stimulus and our collective interest in making the world a better place. Meaning-making is a reward-filled world that requires understanding and modulating your own brain chemistry. Finding an equilibrium among the hierarchy of needs (from survival to transcendence) remains one of the biggest challenges of life.

Is Your Job Your Purpose?

James Suzman, in his book called Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots,¹³ describes how, in the preindustrialized era, people were defined by the communities where they lived. As people took jobs and moved away from those communities, they lost that personal definition and established relationships of belonging to their offices, factories, and companies. Gradually, many of them became defined by their jobs. But many of those jobs provided little sense of meaning or purpose—even if they did provide more economic security.

Now, in many parts of the world—particularly in the United States—people can be defined by their jobs. For some people, their job is their purpose in life. For many, work occupies so much of their time and energy that it becomes difficult to fully understand who they are outside of their office. In recent history, there has been little time or motivation for people to reflect on what matters and what they genuinely enjoy.

Being newly able to engage these big questions during the pandemic led to a shift in how people are making decisions about the work that they do as well as the people and companies with which they do it. Many workers want to do work that aligns with their goals, values, and beliefs. Although these things are rooted in an individual’s perspective, they have much broader implications for the larger communities within which a person participates.

Understanding the relationship between your purpose and your work requires mindfulness and reflection. For example, accountants are sometimes stereotyped as one-dimensional math nerds whose necessary attention to detail prevents them from having a larger vision. But there are certainly accountants who love what they do and derive meaning from it. When asked why they chose accounting as a career path, some might say something like, “I was great at math in high school, and I love working in Excel.” However, a purpose-driven accountant might say, “I enjoy helping people reduce their fear and stress around financial matters.” While the person in each of these examples might love their work, only the accountant who enjoys helping people has understood how their work is linked to their own purpose, how it brings harmony to their life, and how it contributes to the broader society.

Particularly in the United States, people are often conditioned to make decisions about work based on status and income earning potential. Because certain positions are more prestigious than others and allow for more affluent living, these considerations take priority over the question of if and how a role embodies a person’s wants and values. For some, work is not about personal enjoyment or fulfillment but rather about access to a certain lifestyle. But the reality is that work that does not fulfill us in some deeper way may not be sustainable. For this reason, it’s worth thinking about the relationship between enjoyment and work. Enjoyment is a way into talking about purpose, not just what you do but why you do it. Many purpose-driven people find their sense of purpose in their work. They have moved beyond having a job to making a living in good company with others.

So, the next time you meet someone for the first time at a party, instead of asking the usual, “What do you do (for a living)?” try asking “What do you enjoy doing?” Notice how this adjustment makes a different conversation. Office shock has given us a chance to ask ourselves if we are in good company now—or if we could be in better company.

The world’s shifting relationship to work is evident in conversations around the role that work should play in one’s life. Many people seem to be moving from a culture where people live to work toward one where people work to live. The pandemic has provided young professionals with the opportunity to reconfigure their relationship to purposeful work. Rather than seeking purpose through their passions outside of work, while finding work that allows financial security, some are increasingly engaged in lucrative freelance work that incorporates their passions, rather than full-time jobs where they were underpaid and overworked.

The Nap Ministry¹⁴ believes rest is a spiritual practice and a racial and social justice issue. It explores the liberating and restorative power of naps and has a catchy rallying cry: “Rest Is Resistance.” Tricia Hersey, a performance artist and healer, was inspired to create the Nap Ministry while studying the science of sleep and sleep deprivation. She began experimenting with rest as a portal to connect with her enslaved ancestors, whose “rest and dream space were stolen from them.” Rest gives people time to think about basic questions about work and life, and to create new synapses for changing behavior.

In China, young professionals have been rallying under the concept of lying flat. Lying flat,¹⁵ known as “tang ping” in Chinese, is a growing philosophy and movement that challenges competitiveness. As a reaction to being held to such high standards for academic and work excellence, many Chinese millennials are opting to “lay flat” by doing the bare minimum. This means not striving to build their career through attaining high-power and high-pay positions. Some are even choosing not to have children as a form of resistance, saying they don’t want to bring more people into a culture that they deem unhealthy.

Purpose-Driven Organizations

Office shock will give everyone a better chance to seek out or create our own good company. Organizations like the B Corp certify companies that seek to benefit all people, communities, and the planet.¹⁶

New legal models are enabling and encouraging companies to take steps along the Spectrum of Purpose. The Public Benefit LLC, first established in August 2018, is a for-profit limited liability entity to promote a general or specific social public benefit. It has additional statutory requirements to be transparent, accountable, and to uphold its public benefit purpose while maintaining its fiduciary duties.

Taking advantage of this new legal entity, in 2018 Danone North America decided to become the world’s largest Public Benefit Corporation. In 2020 the parent company Danone followed suit by incorporating purpose into its articles of association under a new legal entity in France called “enterprise à mission.” The board accepted salary reductions to finance the Dan’Cares program of employees’ health coverage. The strategic objective of Danone’s new CEO is to accelerate the path to becoming a globally certified B Corp.¹⁷

Another example is the Community Interest Company (CIC), created in the United Kingdom in 2005, which allows for easy to establish organizations with all the flexibility and certainty of the company form, but with some special features to ensure they are working for the benefit of the community. Examples of CICs range widely. Innovative Training Centers such as Striding Out¹⁸ (located in London) focus on helping young social entrepreneurs. Affordable Natural Health Centers, such as The Healing Clinic¹⁹ (located in York, UK), offers an array of alternative therapies and keeps them affordable for the entire community served.

The Purpose Foundation provides another example of a new corporate structure that creates a perpetual-purpose trust for socially conscious business owners to protect their organizations. The foundation works with business owners to use existing trust laws to embody whatever pro-social values are desired by the owner(s) into the legal framework of the organization. Camille Canon, the cofounder and executive director, speaks futureback when she says:

We often think of the system as unchangeable when, in fact, the rules can be rewritten. The imperative to make money can be transformed into a requirement to do good. “It’s not sufficient to just have an idea of what the future could look like—you have to make it actually possible in practice,” Canon said. Business owners now have a potent new tool to translate their ideas for a better future into reality.²⁰

Being a purpose-driven company is hard, and as Neil Bedwell wrote in Forbes, “it’s not enough.”²¹ If a purpose is co-created, it can shift officing from solely transactional to more meaningful engagement for change.

Purpose Imbedded in Place

The Spectrum of Purpose can go even further than good companies by physically building good communities. [freespace]²² is a collaborative initiative that works with community members to co-create spaces by temporarily transforming vacant buildings into community hubs for cultural and civic engagement. Our IFTF colleagues Ilana Lipsett, Mike Zuckerman, and a team of community members in San Francisco created the [freespace] concept during an economic boom. The [freespace] team convinced a landlord to lease them an unused building for $1 and turn it into a place where anyone in the neighborhood could experience art, culture, dialogue, public input, and new opportunities for a period of a few months. [freespace] had only two rules: (1) Everything is free and, (2) Everything was participatory. The result was a shared workplace and community imbued with purpose. It was a physical space in which different social ecosystems could meet, interact, and create together.²³ Now [freespace] communities are happening in other parts of the world, particularly after crises.

Architects over the years have sought to infuse the physical environment with purpose. For example, Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain: Originally designed to reinvigorate the ailing port city of Bilbao, since its inauguration in 1997, it has evolved into a complete rejuvenation of not only the city but the entire region, with a renaissance of local culture. Dubbed the “Guggenheim Effect,” not only does the building ask people to reinterpret its purpose, its presence sparks reinvention.²⁴

The Guggenheim Museum reflects how co-creating purpose can be at the epicenter of changing the relationship between actors in a community. Economist Mariana Mazzucato argues that we should change organizations and governance structures in the design of the practical levers of economic policy—the tools we need to build a purpose-oriented economy. Mazzucato concludes by stating:

Only by redirecting our economy—with notions of the common good and public value of the center of production, distribution and consumption—can we shape and co-create the economy to produce a more inclusive and sustainable society.²⁵

Although many companies are calling themselves purpose driven, Mazzucato argues that “not much is changing.”²⁶ Perhaps it is because the word has so many different definitions that company claims are not authentic (as with “green-washing” where companies claim environmental standing when not credible) or that the definitions are too abstract. Purpose is often imbedded in work culture and may not be explicit. There is a rising acknowledgment that traditional definitions of purpose will not be enough to make a difference in a VUCA world. Mazzucato emphasizes that co-creating public purpose is critical to economic and political change. This is not an easy task.

Shared Missions

In 1973, economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in his landmark book Economics and the Public Purpose that the American economy had been captured by business interests and government had lost its way.²⁷ Forty years later, French economist Thomas Piketty argued that wealth inequality will only continue unless knowledge, skills, and wealth is redistributed.²⁸

In 2021, Mariana Mazzucato builds on both to rethink the narrative of innovation in Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism. She describes how social purpose can guide how public and private actors work together to co-create what she calls public value. Expanding on the example of the United States placing the first man on the moon, she proposes the creation of “mission maps” to address wicked problems of education and health regarding climate change. In Mazzucato’s view, “public” does not mean the government acting alone, but rather acting with the community, in the public interest.²⁹

Increasing consciousness around social injustice and economic inequality are catalysts for change. Since 2017, we have seen an uptick in awareness surrounding social justice issues as reflected through movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter as well as increasing climate activism. Although COVID-19 alone did not begin conversations around gender and race equity or climate change, the pandemic served as a catalyst for individuals and organizations to think more deeply about these issues. Some social movement scholars classify COVID-19 as a “trigger movement,” a sudden historical event that shifts the social, political, and economic trajectory:

Trigger events can create confusion and unease. But they also present tremendous opportunities for people who have a plan and know how to use the moment to push forward their agendas.³⁰

The UN Sustainable Development Goals raise the significance of purpose as a motivator for people because they also trigger what neuroscientist Andrew Huberman refers to as prosocial activity. The Sustainable Development Goal that explicitly addresses meaningful work (Goal #8) emphasizes the importance of economic security for both the individual and the organization. It is important to harmonize both ends of the spectrum to find the right mix for you and your organization’s future.

The Wisdom of Purpose

The Spectrum of Purpose invites more conscious choices along the path of creating a mix between individual and collective purpose. These choices will not be easy, because purpose is often defined narrowly. Such categorical thinking pushes people away from exploring the nuances of purpose, essential in creating better futures for working and living.

Thinking futureback about this spectrum is a potent way to demonstrate the wisdom required to span the complexities of purpose. Kaufman describes this trait as an “openness to experience, the capacity for self-examination and introspection, motivation for personal growth, and the willingness to remain skeptical of oneself, continually questioning assumptions and beliefs, and exploring in evaluating new information that is relevant to one’s identity.”³¹

Clinical psychologist Deirdre Kramer describes how wisdom enables individuals to span the spectrum toward more collective purpose:

Wise people have learned to view the positive and negative and synthesize them to create a more human, more integrated sense of self, in all its frailty and vulnerability. . . . They seem able to first embrace and then transcend self-concerns to integrate their capacity for introspection with a deep and abiding concern for human relationships and generative concern for others.³²

Thinking futureback, leaders will need to play the wisdom game to attract people who are seeking meaningful work and harmony between themselves and their offices, to provide a chance for them to be in good company with others.

Your Choices on the Spectrum of Purpose

The Spectrum of Purpose invites you to move the mixing board slider between Individual and Collective, in search of harmony. This first pass will set you up to make your choices more specific in part III for you as an individual, your organization, and your community.

As you think about your own personal story across this spectrum, consider these questions:

1. How might you illustrate your story about a future with a more positive experience of purpose?

2. Do you derive a personal sense of meaning from your work today? If not, how would you change your experience of purpose?

3. What social value (beyond your own personal income) are you contributing through your officing?

4. Does your organization enhance your individual purpose by having a corporate purpose that is linked to community, beyond individuals?

5. Does your organization have a focus on stakeholders, in addition to shareholders?

6. How can thinking futureback enhance your ability to seek meaningful work?