Purpose - the oft-unseen foundation of business improvement

It was a small company auditorium with some three hundred employees in audience. The managing director of the organization, a polished leader with charismatic personality, an eloquent speaker and a well-known celebrity in his personal life and social circles otherwise, had come from the remote head office of that large conglomerate after a long time to address the employees at this small factory. Just one among many factories. The audience was all ears.

He opened his address with a conversational tone.

"A question to all employees. How many of you work for yourself?"

Several hands were raised.

He then asked, "Good - how many of you work for the company - for the organization that employs you?"

Even a larger number of hands went up this time. By now, some had sensed the underlying shade of suspense with increasingly climactic undertone.

"Finally .. ", He asked, "How many of you work for the customer?"

Almost all the hands went up now except one employee's who was quietly sitting in the front row, unmoved and just visibly observant through all three rounds of questioning, with no particular notable expression on his face.

That probably made the MD a bit uncomfortable as also curious.

"Do you have some different answer young man? Do you want to say something?" He asked.

Hesitantly the employee said,

"Well - the truth is that I work to feed my family. I work for them who are dependent of me. That brings out the best of my intentionality, responsibility, sincerity, commitment and integrity and that works for the customers as well as this business and personally myself. I believe, that's the purpose of my employment."

Not a single face in the audience, including the MD's, exhibited any expression of even a slightest disagreement, but there was a pin-drop silence as if nobody had expected such a response.

Brutal honesty is the first and the most important ingredient in the recipe of determination of the real purpose. As also the sense that the true purpose is seldom skin-deep, overtly visible and seldom crystal clear at that.

The right process yields the right result, as we all know from the Toyota philosophy and even otherwise. At a visible, operational and rather practical level of logic it's a universal dictum. Yet, I dare say, that processes can come and go, can change - but the purpose, even if it is undefined, must be sound and as comprehensively clear as possible for the mission to succeed. That's where lies the long-term philosophy; long-term yet reflected in the day-to-day routine too.

Without clarity of purpose a typical ERP implementation breeds different expectations at different levels of the enterprise. Simplified processes, improved margins, employee satisfaction (with some aiming at reduction in the head count to reduce costs, while some just freeing up time of employees for better tasks, while some expecting simply easier pace freeing up some time) and the list goes on - all at an ambitiously planned pace and cost.

Similarly, I have often seen, that a typical workplace training programme starts off with several different expectations. The functional managers want a lift in productivity and more harmonious culture, some want the training budget utilized in time, some qualification for employees, some improved morale, some a jump in training index - the list goes on.

Unless purpose is clearly worked out, this optimism seldom materialises and with every passing month, disillusionment starts creeping in. Furthermore, priorities start changing as do the real-life situations in the business.

As once said Benjamin Disraeli,

The secret of success is constancy to purpose.

- Benjamin Disraeli

We loosely use the terms purpose, goal, objective, reason, motive or aim and many others to mean the intended outcome and sometimes the cause. Yet we frequently live with obscurity associated with it. Purpose however is philosophically more profound than the rest. Purpose is about "being", the very cause of existence of something, whereas the others are more about what - the "doing". It leads to broader and deeper insights and also provides comparably much stronger impetus than what other concepts can.

The importance of purpose, that I see as a facilitator, is often revealed through numerous viewpoints. I have always found it worthwhile broaching this part of the scope of any improvement initiative at the outset itself with curiosity.

1) Purpose - obscure and partly missed

Purpose is like an iceberg. No matter how explicitly it is stated by the sponsors of the project, the real purpose is almost always obscure, at least partly. People often do not know it themselves. Even leaders.

When a leader is emphasizing the need to achieve a significant increase in the gross profit margin, they imply increase in sales or at least maintaining the sales, without any erosion of the market share, with no erosion of brand equity and above all perfect compliance with the law of the land, while retaining all the valuable employees and maintaining relationships with customers ensuring that their satisfaction ratings do not suffer, while ensuring that any growth and diversification plans are not delayed either - preferably through the people of their choice - with a few more implications yet to surface as initiatives progress.

The expressly stated purpose almost always has implications that cannot be clearly stated on the one hand, and, on the other, they are not as obvious as assumed. This goes well with the famous Mehrabian study which demonstrates that not all the essence of the subject matter of communication is captured merely in words.

2) Purpose - for the business enterprise

For the business enterprise, the core purpose of any initiative almost always is deep rooted into all four dimensions of the system. For the people, it may mean behaviours, development and growth opportunities. Sometimes management of the associated risks too! For the processes - standardization, consistency and stability, costs and scalability. For the products or services (almost always expressly stated), the specifics as required in terms of features and attributes and, for the technology, the reliability, consistency and costs - the short term as well as long term.

One of the most ambitious ventures I witnessed in the earlier years of my career was focused on being a hi-tech venture. The underlying purpose, as was expressly published within the organization was to be consistent with the aspiration of being on the forefront of new state-of-the-art technologies. Technical viability was not only carefully designed but was meticulously established too. Some of the finest technologies were installed right from the beginning. Not much thought was given to in-depth due diligence required for the then non-existent but soon-to-be-necessary demand and the associated scales. After years of draining money, the venture was terminated due to lack of adequate sales. This occurrence is neither new nor rare. Yet it recurs. The underlying reason is almost always the lack of clarity of purpose.

3) Purpose - for employees as individuals

As is obvious, the purpose of any initiative for an employee, however, can be quite different from that the organization has. It can range from running the family expenses or children's education to being consistent in the career progression for some, whereas, quite on the contrary, from doing something completely new that is in line with the educational programme the employee is pursuing outside the work hours.

During the times of Covid, employees who felt confined and shackled to their homes during lockdowns, hastened to return to offices as quickly as possible, whereas many who found the new flexibility convenient, went further to the extent of changing their jobs to maintain it.

4) Purpose - for a leader.

The purpose for the leader, which must be the broadest and deepest of all the interpretations of the purpose of any initiatives, must be a synergistic sum of all the earlier interpretations and some more innate meaning for the leader themselves. The purpose for the enterprise, the purpose for the team, the purpose for all the individuals within and connected to the team and, finally, that for self too.

Who is a leader? This question, though profound, is far too commonplace too now. The definitions are many and so are the applications. Yet, I have always felt, that a true leader is one who influences and causes the target population to progress in the intended direction. What is the intended direction then? Well - that's what the leader's purpose determines. Leader has three orientations of work - the goal, the process and the people. When all successfully converge - they mirror the purpose.

The more one develops the ability to discern this purpose, for all the thin layers that it consists of, the more does one see the world around and the place in it of oneself a lot more clearly and effectively.

As is aptly emphasized by Viktor Frankl in his world-famous book "Man's Search For Meaning":

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

- Friedrich Nietzsche

- Nilesh Pandit

May 4, 2023