Investor’s Business Daily

Issue date: Nov. 14, 2008

Column: IBD’s 10 Secrets To Success

Be Honest And Dependable; Take Responsibility

Follow A Solid Purpose

By Steve Watkins

Be clear about your company’s purpose in order to reach the next level of success. Sure, everyone is in it to make money. But finding something deeper helps your firm stand above others in the long run.

Keys to developing a purpose:

* Find your base. Nikos Mourkogiannis, a leadership consultant and author of the book “Purpose,” starts by asking company leaders why they’re in business and how they’d like to be remembered. Put why before how. “Without the discipline of purpose, you can talk about the hows forever,” he told IBD. “Purpose creates something that stands the test of time.”

* Look at the goal. If you make airplane engines, do you want to innovate or do you want to make them safer? “You’re going to the underlying purpose,” Mourkogiannis said. “Purpose is a game of champions, of good companies that want to be great companies.”

* Get buy-in. You can’t dictate the purpose to staffers. They have to believe it. Get employees involved by gauging their moral ideas and what’s important to them.

* Locate your niche. You don’t have to operate in a world-saving field to develop a purpose that people can embrace. Link the work — no matter how simple it seems — to improving lives of customers or employees, says Rob Galford, managing partner at the Center for Leading Organizations, a Boston-based consulting firm. Even Procter & Gamble can say its toilet paper has a larger purpose. “Soft toilet paper makes people’s lives literally more comfortable,” Galford said.

* Put it in action. Whole Foods Market aims to find the best natural and organic foods, support sustainable farming and pave the way to nurture the body, community and planet. An analyst recently asked Chief Executive John Mackey if the company would cut the quality of some products to reduce prices during the economy’s slump. “We are a mission-driven company and we think our business model is very successful,” Mackey said. “I don’t think we’re going to lower our quality.”

* Find the right talent. You have to get everyone on board. Some people aren’t a good fit for a mission and should go. “I have never done this exercise without seeing some people feel they’re not in the right place,” Mourkogiannis said.

* Personalize it. Put up pictures of people using your products. “That gives people a linkage to purpose,” Galford said. “It’s critically important, in times of crisis, to have something deeply embedded as a value so you know it’s about the customer.”

* Show the impact. Demonstrate that 7,000 people use the product each day, and the value of what employees do hits home.

“It’s not just Mrs. Jones ripping open the package,” Galford said. “It’s tying together the qualitative and the quantitative.”

* Don’t stray. Many lenders slammed by the current financial crisis lost their way. Banks went beyond making standard loans to lending to those who couldn’t afford to borrow. “That’s a loss of purpose in a most dramatic way,” Mourkogiannis said. “At the moment the banks couldn’t make money, there was a complete loss of trust.”