Regarding the need for corporate America to re-build trust, Indra Nooyi, the CEO of Pepsico writes:

 

“I believe the financial crisis has companies facing an interesting fork in the road.  One direction may lead to a short-term, performance-metric focus, an unsatisfactory and unsustainable position for the good company of the future.  The other direction, as a matter of necessity (underline added), may be for companies to take the road that the best companies have been following as a matter of choice.  That is making sure that their financial performance and their ability to be a force for good in the world—their purpose—are facing in the same direction.”  

                                        (Fortune magazine, May 4, 2009)

 

I think she’s right.  Purpose has become a matter of necessity.  To corporate leaders, I would ask:

 

Ø    Do you want to get the best people to work for you today and tomorrow?  Want to get their best efforts, their “discretionary energy,” their full measure of commitment and creativity? 

 

Ø    Do you want customers to trust you?  Want them to choose your products or services based on something other than price?  Want them to experience a real and enduring sense of connection with your company?

 

Ø    Do you want to create a genuine legacy?  Want to leave a sustainable and sustaining institution that you would be pleased to have your children and grandchildren work for someday?  That you would trust to inhabit and keep inhabitable their world?

 

For all of the above, your organization needs to possess and live a genuine, make-the-world-a-better-place purpose that grows out of its deeper values and strengths—as well as the needs of its customers and contexts. 

 

Examples abound if you care to look.  Consider Pepsico, for heaven’s sake.  The “Pepsi Challenge” today has less to do with proving x percent of people prefer the taste of Pepsi to Coke and more to do with solving water problems in the developing world and creating healthier products and eating habits all over the world.

 

In a poem entitled “Loaves and Fishes” (from The House of Belonging), David Whyte writes:  

 

This is not the age of information.

This is not

the age of information.

 

Forget the news,

and the radio,

and the blurred screen.

 

This is the age of loaves

and fishes.

 

People are hungry,

and one good word is bread

for a thousand.

 

I believe the “one good word” for businesses is their purpose, if they have a real one beyond “making money.”  Does yours?  Can you articulate it?  Do you and your company intentionally work at living it? 

 

If you do not think purpose matters in business, please re-consider.  Look.  Read.  Ask.  Talk.  If you are inclined, pray. 

 

Do not let the shortcomings of companies who profess to be purpose-oriented stop you.  No organization or leader gets it all right.  But great companies and leaders engage the question of organizational purpose or “vocation” (Why are we really here?  What are we called to do with our particular capacities in our particular place in the order of things?) in a deeper, more integrated way.  The question is: What are you doing in your organization, with your leadership and life?

 

If you cannot or will not shift your thinking, please make plans to step away from corporate leadership and elevate others who do.  People are hungry…for meaning…for purpose…for a sense that they are making a real difference as they make a living.  And some people close and far away are hungry…literally. 

 

As a matter of necessity, business must lead the way to a more sustainable future across many domains—environmental, social, economic, to name several.  The age of organizational performance without purpose has surely passed.