What Is Your Purpose?
John Izzo is the President of Izzo Associates. He has spoken to over 1 million people and advised over 500 companies including IBM, Quantas, Verizon, Walmart, and Microsoft. He is the author of several books including Awakening the Corporate Soul, and the The Purpose Revolution. You are a master storyteller. What we love to talk about here on The Successful Pitch are great stories that pull at people’s heart strings and are memorable. Before we get into your book, The Purpose Revolution, I just wondered if you wouldn’t mind taking us back to your own story of origin. Did you always know you wanted to be an author and a speaker? How did your own journey start?
Growing up in New York City as a young boy, I was always a do-gooder. I was always more driven by purpose than anything else. There’s only three careers I considered doing when I was a young person. One was to go to law school so I could go into politics. At the time, I thought of politics as a worthy profession, not some slimy opportunistic one. Another one was to be a journalist to expose bad things and tell great stories, or to become a minister. I grew up in a Presbyterian Church in New York City. I sometimes like to say I have wound up marrying all three of those careers. I’m involved in issues I care about, especially the role that business plays in society. I’ve written books that have mostly been journalistic exercises to hear and find out what’s working and to tell those stories to inspire others to change. Finally, I preach 70 to 80 times a year. Unlike a good preacher, I don’t have to write a new sermon every week. Even though I was a do-gooder, I always was a type-A entrepreneurial person. The world of business always fascinated me because I liked to get things done and I like the energy of business, which is often very pragmatic. I did a lot of various things in my career before starting Izzo Associates 22 years ago. The rest is history.
What a great background and combination of multiple things all coming together. Many times, people think, “Something I did ten years ago is not going to impact what I’m doing now.” I find the opposite. It’s unexpected connections that happen, so everything we are interested in and curious about and do helps pull us in to being uniquely qualified to talk about something that no one else has because we have our own unique experiences.
In my case, I did spend six years as a Presbyterian minister. I got to be with people in the most profound and important moments of their lives. I honed my skills speaking to the same audience week after week and having to come up with a new talk to inspire them. I got a degree in journalism. You asked if I always wanted to write books. I remember writing my first beginning of a play when I was ten years old. I remember my family making fun it, but it did not dissuade me from the writing life. I did always have a passion for writing and telling stories. My publisher, Berrett-Koehler, the President, says that my real gift is to go out and find out what’s working and to tell the story and connect the dots. This new book is no exception that I believe in many ways that’s what I’ve done.
Let’s take a dive into the book, The Purpose Revolution. I know you have a keynote around that very topic as well. The subtitle is also interesting to me, How Leaders Create Engagement and Competitive Advantage in an Age of Social Good. There’s three things that pop out there. There’s been some research that more and more companies are all talking about the importance of social good, not just making money, in the companies that they invested in and what consumers are looking for. What happens when a business doesn’t have a purpose?
There are three fundamental things as we think about this idea of The Purpose Revolution. First, purpose-focused people and purpose-focused companies have always been happier and more successful than ones that aren’t. If we think about some of the most successful companies over generations, whether it’s Southwest Airlines that always wanted to treat guests and their employees with great dignity, or Vanguard who soon may pass BlackRock as the largest manager of money in the world that began with a very simple purpose to give the average investor a shot to be successful so they started the low-cost ETF movement. Purpose-focused companies have always been, over time, more successful than ones that are less purpose-focused. We know that people who see their job as a calling, not only are they happier but they perform better on every metric that we care about as business owners. They call in sick less, they’re more productive, they provide better service, they’re more committed, they’re more engaged, they stay longer. We know that purpose has always been a key to a happy life and a successful business.
What’s new is a revolution of expectations where three key groups all over the world are saying, “This is a major reason why I would go to work for someone.” Around 80% of employees say that they want to work for companies they believe in. 50 % of millennials say they would take a pay cut to work for a company or a job that had purpose. A full 40 % of the global workforce are using purpose as a major way they decide who to work for and who not to work for. About 80 % of the customers globally say they want to buy from companies they believe in, who are aligned with their values. About 34 % of global consumers are regularly punishing companies that do bad and rewarding ones that do good. What the revolution is about is that people are saying, “I’m demanding this. It’s becoming a major screen through which I decide who to buy it from, who to work for, and who to invest in.” Wells Fargo and Volkswagen, both of whom share prices were decimated by their choice not to be purpose driven to open accounts for people who didn’t want them and to say you were green and creating green diesel, when in fact you created a software that would lie to the people who would measure your emissions. Increasingly, these companies are being punished and good companies being rewarded with retention, engagement, and stock price.
It’s a demand both from the employees and the consumers to have a purpose be a big part of why they’re going to work and why people are supporting those companies. Starbucks was the first one to come up on my radar of not only giving employees benefits when they work part time, but also tapping into local communities and giving back that way. How can people use this purpose to compete with all the disruption going on? How does that become a competitive advantage?
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