Leading with Noble Purpose

Chapter 8Create Your Purpose Framework

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions.

—Antony Jay, author of the British political comedies, Yes Minister and Yes, Prime Minister

Good leaders look for accurate answers. Great leaders seek bigger questions. To create your purpose framework, you need to start asking different types of questions about your business.

In most organizations, the driving question is how can we make more money off of our existing business model? As we've seen in earlier chapters, this only sets you up for mediocrity. A better driving question is how can we activate our NSP?

Pointing your team in the direction of purpose doesn't mean that you don't track and measure money. Successful organizations are meticulous about money. As a Noble Purpose leader, you'll still track financial metrics, you'll just look at them through a different lens. As we've documented, looking through the lens of purpose will ultimately produce more money for you to track.

Purpose-focused organizations outperform profit-focused organizations because they ask better questions about the business. To illustrate, let's look at a typical business framework.

In every business, you have naturally competing interests. You need to produce exceptional products, but you have to keep them cost-effective for the customer and the market. You need efficient processes, but you can't sacrifice quality for efficiency. You want to hire, train, ...