Culture Shock: A Handbook For 21st Century Business

How Can You Locate a Purpose of Significance?

Let’s get practical. Put simply, there are three steps in the journey towards uniting a group of people in an organization behind a shared purpose:

1 Finding it

2 Framing it

3 Living it.

1 Finding It

Clearly the first step is to find and agree on a purpose that makes sense to the organization and its competencies and can excite and inspire its people. There are two obvious routes to locating a Purpose of Significance:

• from the individual – commonly a leader’s personal passion or perspective, and
• from the group – through a collective effort.

In the individual mode, inspiring characters like Muhammad Yunus of Grameen or Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia stumble upon, or are already driven by, a cause ...