Payoffs, Purpose, and Meaningful Work

by Rod Collins

 

When I was an undergraduate student, I recall a psychology professor relating a story about Sigmund Freud in the final years of his life. Freud had fled his native Austria to settle in London to escape the Nazi oppression. According to the story, a young psychiatrist had traveled from the continent to London to ask the father of psychoanalysis a burning question. When he met Freud, the young man explained that, in studying the pioneer’s work, he had learned much about the abnormal personality, the factors that lead to neurotic disabilities, and the ways to treat people to relieve them of their disorders through psychoanalysis. But what he hadn’t come across in his training was an understanding of what factors contribute to the natural development of the healthy personality. Expecting a long and comprehensive discourse from the celebrated scholar, the young psychiatrist was surprised by Freud’s simple three-word answer: “Love and work.”

One of the attributes of true wisdom is that it is often found in a profound and simple statement. When you think about it, when adults have the capacity to love the significant people in their lives and the good fortune to do work that adds real value to the lives of others, they have the ingredients for what can be arguably described as a meaningful life.

The Millennials Preoccupation with Meaning

Interestingly, in a recent New York Times column, “The Problem With Meaning,” David Brooks questions the current preoccupation of today’s millennials in their pursuit of meaningful lives. While Brooks aptly describes a meaningful life as one where a person finds “some way of serving others that leads to a feeling of significance,” he bemoans that the term meaning has been coopted by a new generation whose use of the word is “flabby and vacuous, the product of a culture that has grown inarticulate about inner life.” He implies that millennials are motivated by a self-regarding emotion and superficial sentiment that tries to replace the foundation of “structures, standards and disciplines” that define our basic moral systems. Brooks concludes, “Because meaningfulness is based solely on emotion, it’s contentless and irreducible…. subjective and relativistic.”

In his response in a subsequent Forbes column, “David Brooks Misconceives The Meaningful Life,” Stephen Denning challenges Brooks’ conclusions about the current cultural evolution, and more importantly, his implied assumptions about the desirability of traditional institutions. Denning writes:

“Rather than lamenting the allegedly narcissistic failings of our culture and the younger generation, Brooks might do better to cast a critical eye at ‘the structures, standards, and disciplines’ that his own generation has created and that he is suggesting that we all embrace.”

Denning argues the real narcissism in our culture is more likely a product of the skewed incentives and the asymmetrical payoffs of a traditional leadership class who are extracting more value than they create. Because the millennials, at this point, are not in a position to transform the institutions of “a world that is not of their own making,” the one thing they can do to prepare for the future when the leadership mantle is passed to them, is to learn to lead differently so they may actualize the much needed transformation of traditional institutions ill-equipped for the challenges of a twenty-first century world. Denning lauds the new generation for “seeking meaning in the sense of finding ways in which their own lives can make a positive difference.”

Institutions Are Creations of Their Times

David Brooks’ implicit faith in traditional institutions may be misplaced. That’s because we suddenly find ourselves confronted by a new world with new rules. The structures, standards, and disciplines that most of us are familiar with are creations of the Industrial Age, which, in its seminal years, transformed the institutions of its time and defined the contours of the twentieth century. Today, the world is being transformed once again by the rapid emergence of the new Digital Age and we are discovering that the context of twenty-first century living is very different from that of the previous century. We are especially experiencing this transformation in the world of work, where an emerging new and radically different operating model is reshaping the institution of management.

Traditional management is a creation of the Industrial Age as a response to the then new need to organize the work of large numbers of people as the locus of work moved from the family farm to the burgeoning factories. From its earliest days, the fundamental model has been the top-down hierarchy, which assumes that the smartest organizations are those that effectively leverage the individual intelligence of their smartest individuals by giving them the authority to command and control the work of their subordinates. This institution, while far from perfect, was nevertheless highly effective for well over a hundred years. Hierarchical management has been so ingrained into the cultural mindset that most of us cannot conceive of any other way to structure a large organization.

Hierarchical Structures Disconnect People From Meaningful Work

Despite its role in advancing the economic well being of society by providing the means for vast number of people to move from poverty into the middle class, hierarchical structures have taken a toll on the individual lives of people by disconnecting them from meaningful work. In hierarchies, only the voices of the few at the top matter; the rest learn that a steady paycheck comes to those who keep their mouths shut and do what they are told. These paychecks are essentially transactional payoffs in organizations where the fulfillment of transactions is the basic context of business activity. It’s not surprising that, according to a recent Gallup study, only a mere 13 percent of people are engaged at work. If large numbers of people are disengaged, then chances are they are finding very little meaning at the place where they spend most of their time. When the focus of work is on discreet transactions, few people understand how their work adds value to the lives of others. They work for economic payoffs, but they have little passion for the places where they work.

From Payoffs To Purpose

On the other hand, the recent technological revolution has created the need for a very different management model—one that is better designed for navigating a business world transformed by the accelerating change, escalating complexity, and ubiquitous connectivity spawned by the revolution. This model assumes that the smartest organizations are those that have the capacity to quickly aggregate their collective intelligence. And the leaders who embrace this innovative management model understand that you can’t leverage collective intelligence unless all voices in the organization have the ability to be heard. That’s why these vanguard leaders eschew hierarchies and prefer to design their organizations as peer-to-peer networks.

The leaders of these innovative networks see the fundamentals of business very differently from their hierarchical counterparts. For them the primary purpose of a business is not about creating shareholder wealth, but rather about creating customer value. This is not to say that shareholder wealth is not important. Indeed, it is very important because, without positive cash flow, no business can survive for very long. Rather, the vanguard leaders understand that shareholder wealth is not the rationale for doing business, but rather the reward that markets give companies when they do business well by consistently creating customer value. This explains why companies such as Google, Zappos, W.L. Gore and Associates (the makers of Gore-Tex), Amazon, and Morning Star consistently outperform their traditional counterparts.

When the purpose of a business is to create customer value, the focus of the organization is not about processing discreet transactions but rather about creating delightful customer experiences and long-term customer connections. And the best way to assure that the organization is connected to its customers is to make sure that everyone in the organization is connected to the true purpose of the business by creating a shared understanding around how each person can make a contribution to the customers they serve. This shared understanding is both an individual and a collective experience of meaning that is rooted in the emotional connection that comes from knowing that those who serve are making a difference in other people’s lives.

When the emotional foundation of work has more to do with the fulfillment of a long-term purpose than short-term payoffs, then work stands alongside love as the passionate pillars of an emotionally rich and meaningful life. Maybe that’s why so many of the vanguard companies are listed on Fortune’s “Best Companies To Work For” and why the millennials, the first generation raised in the hyper-connected Digital Age, are preoccupied with living meaningful lives.

While Brooks’ lament of the millennials’ disregard for traditional systems may be true, his conclusion that the younger generation’s focus on meaning is more superficial than substantive may be more reflective of his lack of understanding than theirs. Denning’s assessment—that the millennials search for meaning is part of a journey to make a positive difference in the way institutions will enhance the human experience in the future—is likely a more accurate depiction of the initial work of a generation that is likely to dramatically change the ways we work together and more likely to realize the simple wisdom of Freud’s advice for a healthy life.

 

 

Rod Collins  (@collinsrod) is Director of Innovation at Optimity Advisors and author of Wiki Management: A Revolutionary New Model for a Rapidly Changing and Collaborative World (AMACOM Books, 2014).