1: Michi, Fred Kofman‘s then seven-year-old daughter, saw him packing for a business trip.
“Please, Daddy, don’t go,” she begged.
“I was tempted,” Fred recalls in his book The Meaning Revolution, “to give her a perfunctory and dismissive response like ‘I wish I could, sweetie, but Daddy has to work.'”
But that’s not what he said. Fred paused for a moment. He would be traveling to the headquarters of the insurance company Axa in Paris.
“If I died, Michi dear, it would be a very bad thing,” Fred shared with her. “I would miss you a lot. I would not get to see you grow. And you’d miss me, too. We’d miss a lot of fun things I am planning for us to do together for many years to come.”
Michi looked at him with tears in her big eyes.
“But if I died, it would be worse than that,” I added.
“Why, Daddy?” she asked.
“Not only would I be gone,” I explained, “but you and Mommy would have financial hardships. Mommy would have to work many more hours to pay for food, the house, the car, your school, and many other things all by herself.”
Fred’s comments were making Michi visibly upset.
“I’ve done something to make all this less bad,” he told her. “Even though I can’t ensure that the first part won’t happen, the people I am going to work with on this trip will make sure that you and Mommy would be okay.
“I’ve made a deal with them so that if something happens to me, they will give Mommy enough money to buy all the things she’ll need to take care of you without having to stay at work any more hours than she does now. The people who do this know that people like me want to protect their loved ones in case they are not there, so I pay them a small monthly fee, and in exchange, they will pay Mommy the money she needs if I die. It’s called ‘insurance,’ and it is a beautiful thing.
“It allows me, and many other people who love others who need them, to go out into a sometimes-scary world with peace of mind. I am grateful to them and proud to help them do this better and better.”
Michi’s eyes were still wet with tears, but she smiled and said, “Go, Daddy, go.”
2: Michi’s transformation was brought about because Fred was sharing with his young daughter why his work and that of his client mattered. This story is about the power of purpose.
“Deep down, every company has a noble purpose,” Fred writes. “It just needs to find it.
“I was proud to help Axa enable people to take care of their loved ones even beyond their physical existence—allowing them to face a risky world with confidence and peace of mind. And their purpose inspired me to give them my absolute best. I was proud to explain to my daughter what I really did.
“I could have told her that I was going to work to make money—Axa was certainly paying me for my services. But that would have been only a half-truth, and the less important half of it. The higher truth was that I was fulfilling my life mission by aligning myself with a company that helped people live better lives.”
This exercise in identifying purpose is one transcendent leaders engage in intentionally with their colleagues.
Here’s the question Fred asks his clients: “How would you describe to a seven-year-old child what your company does in a way that he or she would be proud of you?”
Conversations around purpose yield rich results.
“By discovering the human need that our company’s product or service meets,” Fred writes, “we can connect our people to a noble purpose, one that can bring meaning and pride to us, our colleagues, and our families.”
Doing so also involves empathizing with our clients and associates to understand what’s important to them. “How does what we are offering allow them to meet their needs?
“We all want to create value, make positive social and environmental changes, and increase opportunities for those we care about,” Fred writes. “We all want to work for organizations that understand how best to deploy their technology, their resources, and their talent for the greater good.”
3: Here are some additional questions to help discover purpose:
o Why do we exist as an organization?
o What’s our unique contribution to our customers and the world?
o Why would it matter to anybody else that we succeed?
o Why is our organization worthy of our best efforts?
o Does each of us understand how our efforts contribute to our shared purpose?
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How would I describe to a seven-year-old child what my company does in a way that he/she would be proud of us?
Action: Ask and answer this question with my team.
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