Mike Hohnen

Coaching for personal growth, change and development

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Purpose goes mainstream…

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There is a certain interesting buzz in the air.

Maybe it is more than a buzz – maybe it is a fundamental shift..

It started out some years back as just a murmur or a slight rumbling from the initiated. But lately is has slowly risen in volume and my prediction is that before too long it will have gathered further momentum to become an unavoidable roar.

The shift is the call for ‘Purpose’

In a world with limited natural resources, huge inequality, and financial scandals galore, it is no longer comme il faut to do stuff just for money. That applies not just to companies that produce goods and services but is increasingly demanded by individuals as well – a job is no longer just for the money.

A new generation is emerging (see the generation M manifesto). They demand that we do stuff for a reason and it better be a good one – and just in case you are in doubt money is an outcome not a purpose.

The first time this was brought to my attention was 4 years a go sitting on a tree stump in the Rocky Mountains with my friend Lothar Friis. We were having a profound talk about life, business, gigs and all that. And Lothar said “you know in the end it all boils down to one thing: Purpose. If you have a clear purpose you will almost always bee successful in what you do.” That chat stayed with me rumbling around in my subconscious and I started becoming more aware of purpose as a concept.

The next time I noticed purpose was reading Fred Kofmans book Conscious Business.

A conscious business seeks to promote the intelligent pursuit of happiness in all its stakeholders. It produces sustainable, exceptional performance through the solidarity of its community and the dignity of each member.

In the book he says: “People do not consider Business an area to demonstrate their values .. Why not?”. Kofman asks you to think about a person you admire. Why do you admire that person? List the traits on a pice of paper (try it now by the way) What are the values on that list – probably words like integrity, honesty, caring, love, selfishness, you go on… Is that how business and work relations are run – probably not in most cases. Why not ?

He has a point why can’t we run our business with the same set of values that we would like to see in our local community. Well, five year ago you would be told that that is not the best way to maximize profits, but now it seem it just may turnout to be the only way to maximize profits – read on.

Then I read Peter Block’s “The answer to how is Yes” This opened my eyes to the need to ask ‘why’ before we ask ‘how’. The penny dropped. When we ask ‘Why’ we are looking at purpose (If you have not read it please do – it is a very important book.)

“We too often ask “How?” which focuses too closely on the practical way of getting something done and is actually a subconscious expression of society’s emphasis on control of people, time, and cost. Instead, our concentration should be focused on “Why?”. In other words, we need to pay attention to what really matters to us personally, from heart-felt commitments in our private lives to the creation of projects in the workplace. To be able to act on what matters, explains Block, we must reclaim specific qualities, such as intimacy and idealism. Then we can tackle purposeful work as if we were social architects seeking engagement and change.” (Amazon.com)

In 2006 Nikos Mourkogiannis published the book ‘Purpose – the starting point of great companies’ – a book that according to himself influenced John Mackey in his thinking and contributed to the creation of a new ‘movement’ called Conscious Capitalism that now holds thoughtful, exclusive by-invitation-only gatherings (Introduction to Conscious Capitalism).

FOLLOW YOUR HEART – John Mackey

In 2007 the book Firms of Endearment: How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose is published – a book that was later adopted as the foundation for The Conscious Capitalism Institute (CCI)

“Conscious Capitalism is defined to have three elements; that companies should have a purpose transcending profit maximization, are managed for the benefit of all stakeholders and led by evolved, conscious servant leaders.”

By and by purpose has come out of the shadows of idealism and is going mainstream – obviously the financial meltdown of 2007/2008 has help this thinking a lot and contributed to more people have asking the crucial question: Why do we do what we do?

At TED 2010 Simon Sinek presented his ‘Golden Circle’ and showed that the way to the consumers heart starts with ‘why’ and not ‘how’.- Not as new a concept as he would like us to think but he deliveries the message in a very elegant and convincing way. Sinek has also written a great book on this called ‘Start With WHY’ that I can highly recommend.

SIMON SINEK

Then this spring Umair Haque made the case on his Harvard Business Review blog that doing good is not just good per see – it is just better business. The better Business Manifesto and Why Betterness Is Good Business

Clayton M. Christensen, the Author of The Innovators Dilemma, (also on a HBR blog) then shows us all how important purpose is on a personal level. How Will You Measure Your Life?

“Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success”

And finally this summer Dave Ulrich – not exactly a tree hugger – is out with a new book: The why of Work. Arguing in essence that if your employees don’t understand what you greater purpose is and how they can contribute to that they will be less motivated.

This morning in Fast Company we can read : Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World’s Hottest Agency to Find His Soul

“Alex Bogusky, advertising Dadaist, postmodern media manipulator, pop-culture Houdini, daddy of 21st-century advertising, and now a seeker of meaning on the dirt path of life “ .. “ I guess I just don’t aspire to corporate legacy. I’m convinced that the greatness that matters more is the greatness people achieve through helping each other, through collaborating, more than the greatness that’s achieved by grabbing all you can or getting all you can or building all you can”

If you haven’t heard the cry for purpose – you are not listening – and very soon your customers (and your potential employees) are going to be asking you: “What is your purpose by the way?”. And if you don’t have a compelling answer, they will find someone else who does…

Time out – All set for september 2010

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We have spent the past 3 days checkking out the location for our next Time Out – Tucked away high up in the mountains above Nice in the beautiful Parc du Mercantour.

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You can just spot the hotel in right hand part of the picture. The road winds its way up from the village of Belvedere a distance of about 10 k’s and ends here at the entrance to the Parc. Once you reach this spot there is no longer mobile phone cover and the locals smile overbearingly and shake their heads when we ask for a high speed internet connection. No chance in this part of the world.

We all need to see the world from 2800m from time to time – it gives a different perspective and that is the whole idea behind this project

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The surroundings are breathtaking and I am convinced that this setting will give our participants the opportunity to participate in a reflective process while at the same time getting to enjoy a series of physically challenging outdoor activities that we have planned – which is why we call it: Time-Out.

We shall be publishing more details on this event in the weeks to come – if you are very impatient drop me a note and I will tell you what I know at this point in time.

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The shift from teaching to learning

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Learning by discovery and collaboration once again proved its value.
This week we spent time in Oman working with COWI Gulf. Together with their finance department we developed a 2 day training on the ins and outs of running a project from the financial point of view.I.e. are we on track financially, does this tally with our budget and that sort of stuff

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The challenge here is always: how does one make a subject fun and engaging when it is already considered drab and dull before we even get started.

The traditional approach is of course to arm yourself with a large deck of power-points outlining the does and don’t of financial management.

That may be how you teach finance – but that is not necessarily the best way to actually learn finance.

So instead we created a scenario that very much resembles their day to day situation, with the problems and pitfalls of real life and had them work through that in teams of 3 – if they got stuck they could ask questions – but essentially they worked it out between themselves – collaborative learning in full bloom – what a pleasure!

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Next week we shall take it up a notch…

Are we suffering from Institutional sclerosis?

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Florida:

“It’s almost as if everyone is stuck in the same place. It seems to me that the mental models and frameworks of the Fordist economy, of the mass production economy, are so powerful and so deeply engrained in the way we think, it’s hard to think in other terms.”

Maybe we are managing ourselves to death – our core competency , managing, is becoming our major incompetency.

We need less management and more leadership.

Watch the inspiring interview with Richard Florida

What does this imply for training?

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What does it imply for the way we organise, hold meetings and…

“Conversations are the way workers discover what they know, share it with their colleagues, and in the process create new knowledge for the organization.
In the new economy, conversations are the most important form of work …so much so that the conversation is the organization.”
—Alan Webber, “What’s So New About the New Economy,” Harvard Business Review

Is Forbes asking the wrong question?

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FORBES INSIGHTS asks the question:

Can webconferences, videoconferences and other virtual meetings really take the place of face-to-face contact?
With travel budgets slashed in the wake of recessionary belt-tightening, companies are increasingly turning to technology as a substitute for in-person contact. Yet business executives overwhelmingly agree that face-to-face meetings are not just preferable but necessary for building deeper, more profitable bonds with clients and business partners and maintaining productive relationships with co-workers.

Predictably the answer to their own survey is that 84% prefer F2F meetings.

But is that the right question to ask if you are trying to understand what is happening in the meeting industry?

Not in my mind it isn’t!

This is the kind of question Kodak asked photographers 5-8 years back: Do you think that digital photos will replace film based photography? No way they all hollered.
This is the question big newspaper publishers asked thier readers 3-4 years ago: “Can you imagine not having a daily morning news paper in print form” Since then a large number of them no longer exist.
This is the question publishing houses where asked 24 months ago “Will the eReader replace books?” – that was before Amazon sold 2 million Kindel’s in 6 months. Now they are not so sure. More on eReaders here

But the reality is this:

This is borne out in Forbes Insights survey, where 58% of respondents said they were travelling for business less today than they were at the beginning of the recession in January 2008, with more than a third (34%) indicating they were travelling much less frequently.

This is my point, it may not be what they prefer – but this is what they do – not because it is better but because it is cheaper, and more convenient.

Surevy: would you prefer to fly Business or Turist?… No brainer right?
But why is tourist class then jam packed and Business reduced to 2 rows that are half empty on many European flights? It is not what we would prefer. It is what we do.

The big danger is that we in the industry stick our heads in the sand as a result of surveys like this – pat each other on the back and knowingly nod to each other: “f2f meeting are better – we know that – they know that. All will return to normal soon, you just wait and see….”

I don’t think so

That is what KODAK thought

The question we should be asking is : Is the market broken? – see this by Seth Godin: “What every mass marketer needs to learn from Groucho Marx”

Read the Forbes Insight survey here

What do you think?

Gratitude is a profitable emotion to inspire

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A coming paper in the Journal of Marketing addresses that very subject. Building on past research on the role of gratitude in human relationships, it argues that a customer who is made to feel grateful most likely becomes enduringly loyal as a result. Gratitude, as the paper bluntly puts it, can “increase purchase intentions, sales growth and share of wallet.” Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of the paper, says that making a customer feel truly grateful toward a business is harder than it might sound. And the hard-wired feelings of reciprocity that can trigger gratitude can just as easily trigger the sense that you’re being treated unfairly.

Read the full article in the NYT

Are you in a broken market?

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This beautiful comment from Seth Godin struck a raw nerve with me.

In the ongoing discussion that I have been having on this blog and with clients about the meeting market we also need to ask that question: is it a broken market?

Read this and tell me what you think:

What every mass marketer needs to learn from Groucho Marx

Perhaps the most plaintive complaint I hear from organizations goes something like this, “We worked really hard to get very good at xyz. We’re well regarded, we’re talented and now, all the market cares about is price. How can we get large groups of people to value our craft and buy from us again?”

Apparently, the bulk of your market no longer wants to buy your top of the line furniture, lawn care services, accounting services, tailoring services, consulting… all they want is the cheapest. The masses don’t want a better PC laptop. They just want the one with the right specs at the right price. It’s not because people are selfish (though they are) or shortsighted (though they are). It’s because in this market, right now, they’re not listening. They’ve been seduced into believing that all options are the same, and they’re only seeing price. In terms of educating the masses to differentiate yourself, the market is broken.

Fixing this is almost always a losing battle. Just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean the market cares any longer.

The Marx Brothers were great at vaudeville. Live comedy in a theatre. And then the market for vaudeville was killed by the movies. Groucho didn’t complain about this or argue that people should respect the hard work he and his brothers had put in. No, they went into the movies.

Then the market for movies like the Marx Brothers were making dried up. Groucho didn’t start trying to fix the market. Instead, he saw a new medium and went there. His TV work was among his best (and certainly most lucrative).

It’s extremely difficult to repair the market.

It’s a lot easier to find a market that will respect and pay for the work you can do. Technology companies have been running this race for years. Now, all of us must.

If Wal-Mart or some cultural shift has turned what you do into a commodity, don’t argue. Find a new place before the competition does. It’s not easy or fair, but it’s true. You bet your life.

[Please note that nothing I wrote above applies to niche businesses. In fact, exactly the opposite does. You can make a good living selling bespoke PC laptops or doing vaudeville today, even though the mass of the market couldn’t care a bit. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know…]

Blatantly copied from one of my favorite blogs Seth Godin – read more here