Meaning is the new money

87% of people are disengaged at work. They have left the job but they haven’t told anyone! Millennials and Gen Z want a reason to go to work, not a place to go to work nor a shared server to log onto.

89% of customers favour purpose-driven brands. Purpose is the secret sauce of winning in an age of environmental crisis and technological disruption.

When you fall in love with a widely felt pain point – then you have the opportunity (and perhaps the responsibility) to galvanise at scale. A strong sense of purpose clarifies. It acts as a filter, making dealing with complexity – at least a little easier.

However, acting with sense of purpose and being true to it isn’t easy. Doing the right thing rarely is. It is difficult because it requires saying no to something. You cannot be all things to all people and maintain purpose.

But people follow purpose – with much more intensity than they follow job titles or money. The challenge is to allow yourself and your organisation to be purpose-led, principles focused and where performance is measured as purpose translated.

The key performance question is: are you meeting, exceeding or falling behind in your purpose? A good Theory of Change will enable you to identify the most relevant purpose-driven data for your organisation.

If there was ever a time to be fearless this is it! The “code red for humanity” situation that we face cannot be solved with today’s thinking. We need to move beyond incremental improvements on the edges. We need to challenge every assumption that traps us, navigate our escape with urgency and completely redesign pretty much everything we do.

We need to move from thinking in terms of 10% to 10x. What can fuel that type of transformation? Conventional tactics and rewards are guaranteed to fail.

In this era, meaning is the new money – in fact it was always was, but we lost sight of that!