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Tag: Purpose

The Meaningful Workplace: It Takes New Ways of Thinking, and Acting

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The Meaningful Workplace is the fourth in a series. 

How do you build an workplace where people are willing to bring their gifts of initiative, creativity, and passion?” – Gary Hamel

You can’t build a workplace that is meaningful to people using the old mentality and outdated tools. Old techniques are no good if they have rendered your current workplace meaning-neutral or, at worst, meaningless.

To forge meaningful alliances with meaning-seeking employees requires new ways of thinking and acting. Familiar business constructs that have formed the foundation of employer/employee relations are being rethought and retooled to make business fit for the future.

Ambition is the new purpose

“The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.” – Socrates

Workplaces become meaningfully relevant when employees see the point of what they and their employers are out to do. This is the company’s why. It’s reason for being. It’s meaningful ambition.

When presented in a credible, inclusive, and authentic way, the company’s meaningful ambition is respected, admired, and embraced by employees. It aligns to their personal value. It satisfies their desire for meaning.

Employees can see themselves within their company’s meaningful ambition. They see how they can actively make it possible. They feel inspired to make it happen, and they come to work each day to make it happen. They discover a way of achieving a meaningful outcome for themselves, their employer, and the world in general. Ambition increases. Happiness increases, and meaning is naturally created.

Did you miss the first three parts of this series?

Read Being Meaningful: It’s the Key to Better Engaging Your Employees, Getting Employees to Respond Positively  and Why Workplaces Aren’t Meaningful Now.

This series is excerpted from a white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace that was first published at Emotive Brand.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy and creative design consultancy

How Do You Define the Purpose of Your Business?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

Seeing Profit as a Consequence, Not a Purpose

Like many, you probably default to saying, “To make profits”. And while that is certainly an aim of every capitalistic enterprise, it falls short as a useful and motivating driver of an enterprise. Too great a focus on profits draws attention away from the triggers of success in today’s world.

Continue reading “How Do You Define the Purpose of Your Business?”

The CEO Challenge – Turning Corporate Vision Into Reality

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

The corporate vision statement

We’ve written before about the gaps between what business leaders believe and what their employees think when it comes to the company’s corporate vision and values.

Today we’d like to explore another gap. This is the gap between what the CEO sees as the company’s vision, and what employees are doing to help achieve that vision – often referred to as the Corporate Vision Statement.

In some cases, the gap exists simply because employees haven’t been informed of the vision.

As such, they are left to their own devices, pulling the company and its brand strategy apart because they don’t know how or why they’re meant to keep it together.

In other cases, the gap exists because the vision was delivered to the employees in a way that left them feeling less than enthusiastic.

Delivered in an alienating “corporate” way and not in a meaningful “human” way.

It therefore did not enchant, inspire or engage the employees.

It simply did not matter to them.

It literally “went in one ear and out the other”.

We help our clients turn their vision into a meaningful reality.

We get corporate visions to matter to employees, and employees align to the vision.

We do this by translating the “corporate vision” into a credible and meaningful “human ambition”.

We make the vision both personally relevant and emotionally important to employees.

They come away not only with a clear idea of what they need to do, but also with a profound sense of why they should help the company achieve its vision.

As result they are motivated to propel the company and its brand to a more meaningful position in the world – a position defined by the CEO’s vision and tempered by an understanding of what it takes to get people to care in today’s world.

Have you been involved in any programs where this has been executed well? If so, we’d love to help.

If you have a “corporate vision” that has not yet been articulated into a meaningful brand narrative that employees can rally around and believe in, let us know. We can help!

You might enjoy reading more about our ideas around Brand Promise by visiting our blog.

We are launching a new solution entitled “Path to Purpose”. This is a 6-week program that was developed for senior leadership teams to get aligned around the value of a corporate purpose statement, how to articulate it, what it means to your business, and how it can align your entire organization around it meaningfully. If you are interested in learning more please contact Co-Founder, Tracy Lloyd.

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco brand strategy firm.

Purpose Beyond Profit – A Shift in Perspective

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

At Emotive Brand, we’re big on the concept of Purpose Beyond Profit. Apparently, people interpret this phrase in interesting ways.

Some jump to the conclusion that it means “purpose instead of profit.” That’s a valid approach for B-Corps, perhaps, but most companies – including this one – would prefer to make some money.

Some people think the phrase means “profit plus being good to the environment.” We’re okay with that definition, but it’s still too easy for many brands to dismiss for one reason or another.

The deeper definition applies to all brands, if they can make a simple shift in perspective.

There’s a teaching story about perspective used in the field of psychology. A Buddhist psychologist and a Freudian psychologist meet at a conference. The Freudian asks the Buddhist to explain how their approaches could be different. Aren’t the things that make people unhappy the same everywhere, and don’t psychologists have to deal with those things to get people back to normal?

The Buddhist says, “Yes, with one difference. In Buddhist psychology, the goal is not getting people from negative 5 back to zero. The goal is to go beyond zero to plus five, to plus ten, to a hundred.”

The point of this story for psychologists is that they can do much more than undo deficits.

The point of this story for us is that most people in business would say that their goal is the same as the Buddhist. They want to get their profit beyond zero to plus five, or plus ten, or whatever the target might be.

They would be half right, like the Freudian. The shift in perspective for brands is recognizing that the customer is still stuck at zero.

Most of the time, we pay for things and get what we consider equivalent value. We trade money for something else we need, like food or clothing or travel. We take a chance that we’re getting roughly equal value for our money, and if we do, we’re even. Zero-sum game.

In other words, no brand loyalty. Nothing for the brand beyond the profit.

The best brands generate loyalty – and higher profits – by getting us way past zero, so far that we feel like we won a prize.

Think of a brand you identify with, one that beats zero for you personally. (This may take a moment.) When you identify them, there are almost certainly two reasons. First, the brand means something to you because of who you are. Second, that “something” is not about a product or service. It’s the way the company approaches its products or services.

People who love Southwest Airways love it because of how democratic it feels. Actually flying an airplane safely has nothing whatsoever to do with democracy. But it does make customers feel that they are treated equally, by their equals, without a lot of pretenses. People who value those qualities feel good about themselves when they fly Southwest.

People who own BMWs used to drive me nuts the way they talked about the cars – until I got stuck with one as a rental. It hit me with physical force that people were not talking about the car. They love driving itself. A company that gets who they are, and makes them feel more alive behind the wheel, gets their love for life. Turns out I am one of those people. After I drove the car, I bought one. I went from sneering at BMW snobs to thinking of them as my brothers and sisters.

Again, you don’t have to love driving to build a car. But to make your customers feel something meaningful beyond the machine, you have to approach that engineering in a particular way.

To take the best-known example of all, look at how Apple relentlessly changed the emphasis in IT from technology to us, the people who use it. We humans don’t love technology, or technology brands per se. We love expressing ourselves, and technology that magically, invisibly makes us more expressive is beyond price.

It’s also beyond profit, even if Apple makes a ton of money. Steve Jobs’ legacy is a company that doesn’t care how hard something is, doesn’t take its cues from what other people are doing, doesn’t let conventional thinking limit what it does or where it goes.

And that’s only partly because he studied Buddhism. It’s also because we all want to be like that at some level.

We all have a best self we know we want to be and express. We want brands to recognize and speak to that best self — not just to the zero-sum consumer who needs to put food on the table and keep a roof overhead.

Purpose beyond profit means reaching into people’s hearts for where their sense of self lives, and lighting it up.

If you have your own examples – brands that take you past zero with what they mean to you – let us know and we’ll share.

Download our White Paper on Purpose Beyond Profit to learn more.

Download White Paper

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

Employer Brand: It Doesn’t Happen by Messaging Alone

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

“The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.” – Saint Augustine

People today, including employees and prospective recruits, are looking for more meaning in their lives and in their work. This is why there has been a rise in budgets directed to more meaningfully connect with employers and an increase in budgets to develop a company’s Employer Brand.

Messaging alone won’t pull employees in

This is especially true when investing in your Employer Brand, and trying to build a Meaningful Workplace. It becomes far more involved than simply sending a PDF of the master plan to every employee or hanging posters in the cafeteria. Indeed, every aspect of the master plan’s deployment needs to be done in a highly sensitive and respectful way.

It has been said that messaging is dead, meaning that the idea of simply creating and broadcasting a bank of words, no matter how charmingly poetic they may be, simply doesn’t cut it any more.

Such business transmissions smack of company speak, and worse, of marketing. Eyes glaze over. Defensive shields are erected. Pure messaging attempts fail.

The goal, after all, is a meaningful outcome that seeks to bring the employer and the employee closer together. This is not to say messaging doesn’t play a role in the development of an Employer Brand.

What it does say is that messaging cannot be the primary tool for instilling a sense of ambition, for evoking feelings, and for creating a meaningful culture.

This excerpt is the eighth in a series from our white paper titled The Meaningful Workplace.

Photo credit.

Is it Time for Your Business to Embrace the Purpose Economy?

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

According to Aaron Hurst, we’ve moved from the Information Economy to the Purpose Economy. He states that this is a natural evolution, which is taking us from the first levels of human organization, the hoe-and-plow Agrarian Economy, through the smokestacks of the Industrial Economy, to the data farms of the Information Economy, and now to the human-centric Purpose Economy. Each of these economies been built on top of the proceeding, and represent evolutions more than revolutions.

In his book, Hurst states:

“When I say purpose, I mean more than serving others and the planet. Service is certainly at the core, but in speaking with hundreds of professionals and reading thousands of essays, I’ve discovered that there are two other key sources of purpose people seek: a sense of community and the opportunity for self-expression and personal growth. In other words, they pursue personal, social, and societal purpose.”

Continue reading “Is it Time for Your Business to Embrace the Purpose Economy?”

Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

“Ambition” is the new “purpose.” Workplaces become meaningfully relevant when employees see the point of what they and their employers are out to do: the company’s “why”, it’s reason for being, it’s meaningful ambition. When presented in a credible, inclusive and authentic way, the company’s meaningful ambition is respected, admired and embraced by employees because it aligns to their personal values and answers their desire for meaning.

Continue reading “Purpose Becomes Ambition in a Meaningful Workplace”

Your Brand Strategy for the Purpose Economy

Posted on by Tracy Lloyd

According to Aaron Hurst, we are moving from the Information Economy to the Purpose Economy. He states that this is a natural evolution, which is taking us from the first levels of human organization, the hoe-and-plow Agrarian Economy, through the smokestacks of the Industrial Economy, to the data farms of the Information Economy, and now to the human-centric Purpose Economy. Each of these economies been built on top of the proceeding, and represent evolutions more than revolutions.

In his book, The Purpose Economy Hurst states:

“When I say purpose, I mean more than serving others and the planet. Service is certainly at the core, but in speaking with hundreds of professionals and reading thousands of essays, I’ve discovered that there are two other key sources of purpose people seek: a sense of community and the opportunity for self-expression and personal growth. In other words, they pursue personal, social, and societal purpose.

The resulting challenge for brands is to find their place within this quest for meaning and purpose. This new and higher-order of connection can be made at many levels within a brand organization. It can, for example, revolve around the core offering of the brand – how its products and services directly add to individual and collective well-being. Or, it may revolve around the brand’s actions in the realm of corporate responsibility. Indeed, a brand’s purpose may be centered in the shared values, attitudes, and behavior of its management and employees.

Often leadership is preoccupied with performance, and therefore can fail to recognize the good and meaningful aspects of their brands. However, if they are helped to stand outside their immediate world, leaders are able to recognize, appreciate and seize the meaning that already resides in their brand.

Through a smartly planned brand strategy, one that builds upon empathy, purpose, and emotion, they are able to bring these virtues to life in new ways.  The first task is to explore the ways your brand already helps people in their pursuit of personal, social, or societal purpose. Next, build upon your brand’s inherent goodness, and create new meaning by finding new ways of either combining the meaningful aspects of your business, or by using the existing meaning to inspire new actions that expand the meaningful platform of your brand.

Is it time for your brand to embrace The Purpose Economy? Consider this: think of all the companies that were slow to adopt the central principles of the Information Economy. How many can you remember? How many were leapfrogged by forward-thinking brands? How many still exist?

Don’t get left behind. Rethink your brand strategy in light of the Purpose Economy and thrive.

For more information, you may enjoy our most popular paper Purpose Beyond Profit.

Download White Paper

as well as reading the book

The Purpose Economy by Aaron Hurst.

—

Emotive Brand is a San Francisco branding agency.

 

Purpose Becomes Ambition

Posted on by Jerry Holtaway

“Ambition” is the new “purpose”

“The nearest way to glory is to strive to be what you wish to be thought to be.” – Socrates

Workplaces become meaningfully relevant when employees see the point of what they and their employers are out to do: the company’s “why”, it’s reason for being, it’s meaningful ambition.

When presented in a credible, inclusive and authentic way, the company’s meaningful ambition is respected, admired and embraced by employees because it aligns to their personal values and answers their desire for meaning.

Continue reading “Purpose Becomes Ambition”