So we're talking about how purpose can help people in the real world, in real life. We started by talking about college and the military. Experiences among younger adults and how purpose can really help them in shaping their outcomes, shaping their future. Really, really important. Now we're going to talk a bit about what happens when you're at work and about workplaces and purposeful workplaces, purposeful employees. But let's start with this person who essentially is the father of modern sociology. His name is Emile Durkheim. Emile Durkheim, in the late 1800s, was noticing, as other researchers were noticing, that people in Europe were starting to commit suicide at an increasing rate. So he started looking back saying, "What's going on? What's happening? Why are we committing suicide at a much higher rate?" Particularly in France where he was studying this. So he ended up doing this very deep study of suicide and wrote a book called Suicide. Here's what he said toward the end of that book. He said, "He must feel himself more in solidarity with a collective existence which precedes him in time, which survives him, and which encompasses him at all points." Here's what he's saying, he's saying basically in the past in France, people were living in little villages, and in those little villages, everybody had a certain purpose. We've talked about that previously. Then suddenly now they're moving into bigger cities, working in factories, and they're not feeling that sense of purpose so much. They're not feeling a sense of solidarity as much as when they are in their smaller villages. The collective existence just wasn't there. So he said, "If this occurs, he will no longer find that the only aim of his conduct in himself and understanding that he is an instrument of a purpose greater than himself. But what groups are best?" Now he's starting to ask, how do we create this collective existence now that has some type of purpose to it? He analyzes political society and says, "No, I don't think political society is going to do it for most French people, and probably not religious society now because in France, at least in the late 1800s, we're starting to lose our religion. Not even the family because we're leaving our families, we're leaving our villages to start working in major cities around France to work in these bigger factories. So our families are not a part of our collective existence quite so much anymore." Then he says, "Besides the society of faith, of family, and of politics, there is one other of which no mention has yet been made, the occupational group or corporation." Which is an odd thing for Emile Durkheim to say, because he was a socialist, and you might not have expected him to talk about corporations. He wasn't just talking about unions and corporations, he was talking about the corporation being this collective existence that you could start finding purpose and meaning from. So let's unpack that a little bit. So there's a story about a custodian at NASA in the early 1960s. NASA was being reviewed by John F. Kennedy, the president at the time. The president walks up with his entourage to the custodian and says, "Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?" The custodian says, "Well, Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon." I love this story because this is a story about job crafting. In a work site, more and more people need and want meaning from their work. Increasingly now, millennials, for example, want meaning in their work. In fact, millennials are willing to accept $20,000 less in a job if they feel that the job has great meaning. This custodian found meaning through his work. He is putting a man on the moon. It's a great quote and really reflects what I'm trying to talk about in terms of crafting your purpose no matter what your job title is. Amy Wrzesniewski is a professor in the Business School at Yale University, and she's a person who's studied job crafting a great deal. This is what she says, "Increasing emphasis is placed on the importance of work as a source of fulfillment, meaning, and purpose in life today, as individuals spend more time at work and change jobs more often and readily than in the past." If you're a company and you want to attract the best people and keep those best people, you need to start thinking more about a transcending purpose of your company. What is your company doing to help society? So a big question is, can accompany actually have a purpose like that? Can a company build their own strength of purpose and direction? Most companies have mission statements, but very often, those mission statements are like little slogans that most people don't really believe. Can you have a genuine and very authentic purpose? There's a really cool research study done called Firms of Endearment. It was done by three business school professors. These business school professors picked out 28 companies. Half of them were public, and half of them were private companies. They picked these companies not only on the basis of their purpose toward shareholder value because that would be the typical purpose of a company. How do we build shareholder or stockholder value? But they also said, "How can we help our employees? How can we be purposeful in the sense that we want to engage our employees and support our employees, but very importantly also, how do we support our communities?" So these Firms of Endearment were picked according to their ability to enhance the lives of their employees and enhance the communities that surround the companies, not just shareholder value. So these firms of endearment were super-special companies. Then they compared these companies against the S&P or Standard and Poor's 500, which is basically looking at the performance of the stock market, and also Good to Great companies. Good to Great was a book that was written about companies that had really strong financial performance, they had strong financial prowess, they had great leadership. But these weren't necessarily firms of endearment. They weren't necessarily companies that were focused so much on their communities or their employees, but they were companies that had very, very strong leadership and financial prowess. So what they did in Firms of Endearment in this study was compare the 28 companies that they had selected against the S&P 500 and against the Good to Great companies in terms of financial performance over a 15-year period of time. So three years after they picked these Firms of Endearment, they found that the Good to Great companies were doing much better than the Firms of Endearment and much better than S&P 500. Now let's look five years out. The five-year forecast started showing that all of these companies were starting to coalesce in terms of financial performance. Again, the S&P 500 not doing as well as the other two, the Firms of Endearment or The Good to Great companies. Now let's go at 10 years. We start to see that the Firms of Endearment are actually doing better than the other two, and then we need the whole height of this slide to show what happened by 15 years. That the Firms of Endearment returned a 1681 percent return on investment. That's unbelievable compared to Good to Great companies, 263 percent, compared to the S&P 500, a return of 118 percent on your initial investment. So you see that having this strong self-transcending purpose, and actually I might call it a revenue-transcending purpose, resulted in more revenue for these Firms of Endearment. Just like a self-transcending purpose returns greater outcomes, more positive outcomes for an individual. It's really an amazing finding. So let's take a look at the US workforce right now. There was a Harris Poll survey years ago that asked employees how connected they were to the purpose and core values of their company. Thirty seven percent of these US workforce employees clearly knew their company's purpose. Twenty percent were enthusiastic about the purpose of the company. Twenty percent could see how they as an employee could support the purpose of the company. Only 15 percent felt enabled to work toward the purpose, and 20 percent fully trusted the company that employ them. Is that a good set of statistics or not? It's not unexpected when you look at the US workforce right now. What if that were a football team? So what if you're the quarterback in this football team and on this football team, on the offensive side, there are 11 players and you find among all 11 players that only four of them know which goal they're going to. That only two of them cared. That only two of them knew which position they're supposed to be playing. The two of them believe that their efforts could make a difference out of the 11, and that eight of them would just as soon be rooting for the other team. That makes little sense, right? When I talk to groups, to companies about this, people have a nervous laugh because they know they should be acting like a team, but that they're not typically.
