A Purpose Worthy of Commitment

A PURPOSE WORTHY OF COMMITMENT

Creating an environment where people can grow starts with “having a purpose worthy of people’s commitment,” says Goran Carstedt, former president of Volvo Sweden and IKEA North America (and SoL’s first managing director). “Business leaders often ask their people to be committed to the organization’s goals,” says Carstedt. “But the real question is what is the organization committed to, and is that worth my time?” Despite much literature on organizational purpose, and ubiquitous vision and values statements, “there is a lot of cynicism,” says Saillant, among employees about where their company’s real commitment lies. And a lot of confusion—starting with the idea that the purpose of a company is, by definition, to maximize return on invested capital. Years ago, Peter Drucker said that “making money for a company is like oxygen for a person; if you don’t have enough of it you’re out of the game.” In other words, profitability is a performance requirement for all businesses, but it is not a purpose. Extending Drucker’s metaphor, companies who take profit as their purpose are like people who think life is about breathing. They’re missing something.

The argument for a wider purpose also concerns long-term business performance.[2] People choosing where to work may care about what an organization stands for. When its purpose fits their values, they have a reason to commit their efforts to it; when work conflicts with those values, that commitment becomes harder to sustain.

“I just wanted my work life and personal life to be one life,” says Brigitte Tantawy-Monsou of Unilever. After a career in supply chain management, R&D, and business excellence, Tantawy-Monsou says her introduction to organizational learning, personal mastery, and mental models in 2002 “helped me to make sense of my past experiences. Because I am very analytical and scientific, it also gave me a new dimension, a ’soft’ dimension. It helped me see that you can understand an organization or team as a social system, and that there is a more integrated way of looking at problems.” She found that the systems view also applied to her personally. “I was especially interested in the idea of alignment between a person and [his or her] company’s goals and values. This was a new management concept, and it spoke to my personal desire for alignment.”

Gradually, Tantawy-Monsou found herself drawn into projects truly worthy of her commitment, applying organizational learning tools to Unilever’s sustainability agenda. Eventually she was even able to redefine her job so that she could work full-time on sustainability. “I wanted to contribute more, both inside the organization and beyond, to issues that really mattered, and organizational learning helped me build my capabilities to have more influence. It’s coincided with a step in my career, and in my life as a whole.” But this would not have been possible had not Unilever’s top management, several years earlier, begun to recognize that historic environmental changes threatened the future of their businesses. As one of the largest sellers of fish products (food products made with fish) in the world, they realized by the mid-1990s that, in the words of one top executive, “We won’t have a fish business worth being in if there aren’t fundamental changes toward sustainable fishing.”[3] At the time of this account, in addition to working on business-related sustainability initiatives within Unilever, Tantawy-Monsou was an organizer of the European SoL Sustainability Consortium, an extension of the U.S.-based SoL Sustainability Consortium. “I’ve almost always enjoyed my work, but for the first time I feel now that I am able to work on what really matters to me as a person,” she says.