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TRANSCRIPT

Four key quotes:

“By everyone knowing our purpose statement, it creates a golden thread—so no matter where you are in the world, what culture you have, whether you're a new employee or a tenured employee, what service line you're in and what work you do you come to work to do every day, we are all connected by the fact that we are all building a better working world.”

“Purpose alone is not a magic bullet and it never belongs in a conversation by itself; purpose + vision + long-term value, when you look at that equation, that is the power equation.”

“If you want to be an organization that claims to be purpose- and vision-led, you need to be led by leaders who themselves are purpose- and vision-led, which means developing a platform and program around personal purpose and vision.”

“We view the role of L&D as having a role in helping people become better, right? Better performers, better colleagues, better leaders, better people, and helping people discover and activate their purpose and vision almost immediately makes them better in all of those categories. And of course, many complementary ways outside of L&D to also activate purpose. But you know, your question is about how the role that L&D teams play in bringing purpose and vision, it's helping people become better people.”

Chris Pirie:

You're listening to Learning Is The New Working, a podcast by the Learning Futures Group about the future of Workplace Learning and the people helping define it.

This is an episode in our ’Is Purpose Working?’ season—a collaboration with Dani and Stacia from RedThread Research. This episode is sponsored by NovoEd: global enterprises rely on NovoEd's collaborative, cohort-based learning platform to deliver high-value programs with real business impact. With NovoEd, you deliver powerful and engaging learning that activates deep skill development and drugs and measurable business outcomes.

On March the 11th, at 10:00 am Pacific time, NovoEd is hosting a live webinar where you can join RedThread Research founder Stacia Garr, Dani Johnson and myself to discuss what we've learned in our season exploring the implications for learning and talent management of purpose aligned organizations.

We can't wait to meet you and to get your questions and observations and experiences on the topic of purpose alignment, as well as share our own reflections and research. We're really looking forward to it; to register for your seat, submit questions and access lots of bonus material around all these episodes, including transcripts, please go to www.NovoEd.com/purpose.

“Purpose alone is not a magic bullet, and it never belongs in the conversation by itself. Purpose + vision + long term value—when you look at that equation, that is the power equation. That's the one that if you really want to make a difference in the world for all of your stakeholders, that's the equation that's necessary when you think about high strategy.”

Chris Pirie:
In this episode, Stacia and I interviewed Tal Goldhamer and Jeff Steir. They’re both in the professional services firm, EY. Jeff has led the ‘purpose plus vision’ practice for EY Americas since 2014, where he and his team help organizations and their leaders articulate what they stand for and implement purpose at scale. Tal is the chief learning officer for EY's America's division of over 80,000 individuals across 30 countries.

As you will hear, Jeff and Tal work really closely together in a unique partnership that revolves around the power of purpose. Their work forms a sort of virtuous circle that helps both customers and employees understand their personal and organizational purpose and where the insights gained from the customer-facing work that Jeff does informs employee facing programs that Tal runs and which in turn are made available to those customers to help them define their own and build a better working world.

Tal Goldhamer:
Hi, it's Tal Goldhamer; I’m the chief learning officer at EY for the Americas practice.

Jeff Stier:
And this is Jeff Stier: my job title is the lead for the ‘purpose and realize’ solution within people advisory services at EY.

Chris Pirie:
Well guys, welcome to Learning Is The New Working and thank you so much for your time and sharing your insights with our audience today. Today, I'm joined by Stacia, and we're going to talk to you about purpose driven organizations, and I know we're going to have a really interesting conversation, so welcome to the podcast.

Tal Goldhamer:
Thanks, Chris, and thanks, Stacia. You know, one of the things that I'll share a little bit of why I'm so excited about this; I wake up every day inspired to make things better for others so that they can thrive and in turn, make things better for others. And we've been on a purpose-envisioned journey for a few years, and we've learned a lot and we're excited to share all of what we've learned with your listeners, so thanks for having us.

Chris Pirie:
Could you start by telling us what part of the world you live in and work in and why?

Tal Goldhamer:
Well, because of the pandemic, it's a trickier question, but I was born and raised in New York City, technically work in New York City, although I’m right now physically in Denver, Colorado—I made a pandemic getaway and escaped with my family out here. So it's a two-pronged answer; my heart is in New York City, but my heart is finding a home in Denver, Colorado.

Stacia Garr:
Those mountains will do it to ya!

Tal Goldhamer:
The mountains and the skiing, so yeah.

Jeff Stier:
So I was born in Connecticut, but spent the last 26 years in New York City, raised a family in the city; right now, sheltering in place in the Northern Catskills, in a town that I love to say the name called Cornwallville, lots of farmers. It is 12 miles from a ski mountain, so we get a lot of skiing up here as well. And you asked the question why I never thought I was going to raise a family in New York City—I grew up in the country—but my wife is from Queens, New York and she is an only child and her mother lived in Queens, so she tricked me to moving from Boston to New York city so that we can be close to her mom. And it was a great decision and we've been very happy raising our family there.

Chris Pirie:
Can each of you tell me what your job title is and sort of briefly describe the scope of your responsibilities?

Tal Goldhamer:
So our team works every day to develop programs where people are so inspired by what they're learning and they're experiencing that they feel compelled to pass it on to others. And as the chief learning officer for EY in the Americas, we try to create that world for over 80,000 people in about 30 different countries.

Jeff Stier:
I look over a practice called ‘purpose vision and long-term value realized;’ we help organizations transform around those three foundational elements that I call high strategy. When an organization is looking to create what they stand for, what they believe in, and then use that as filters in decisions for how they run their companies, we help them create high strategies around purpose, vision, and long-term value. We've been doing that for about eight years, both internally with EY and externally with clients.

Stacia Garr:
I love that focus on long-term value. One of the things that we've seen here with the podcast is how a potential impediment to purpose is short-term thinking—you know, not knowing when you're going to get the return on purpose. And so I love that you are combining those two concepts and kind of helping people think about that longer term in what you're ultimately trying to become.

Jeff Stier:
About three years ago, we had an ‘aha’ moment—that purpose was one element of high strategy, but vision looking to the future was another. And of course, when you look to the future, what you want to become, and the impact you want to have on the world, those things require some measurement that so you know, you're progressing on that journey. And so long-term value, purpose envision where the natural mix is in the equation for us.

Chris Pirie:
I think what else is really great about having both of you in this conversation is both the internal perspective and responsibilities that you have, Tal, and the insights that you bring into the dialogue, Jeff. For anybody who's not familiar, and that can't be many people, but it's good to just cover our bases, can one of you introduce the EY business and business model?

Jeff Stier:
About nine years ago, we had a new CEO take office and he looked to the future and realized that the consulting business was something that was going to grow significantly. As part of EY, we had primarily been known as a tax and audit organization, and we were called Ernst & Young at the time, with a tagline of ‘quality in everything we do’—very inward-focused.

And he had the vision to say, what got us here won't get us there. And so as part of our own transformation and the legacy he wanted to leave, we changed our name formally from Ernst & Young to EY, that tagline ‘quality in everything we do’ to a purpose statement of ‘building a better working world,’ and we began to transform ourselves around that high strategy.

As we began doing that, a lot of our clients had interest in purpose as well. The leaders at Davos were starting to talk about that. And so we started getting requests in the strategy practice where I sat at the time saying, can you help us take the lessons you've learned—positive and negative—and transform ourselves?

And so that's the journey we've been on. And, and now that's the business model, at least Tal and I work on together, both through the internal and the external client-facing side.

Chris Pirie:
What's the talent landscape look like at EY?

Tal Goldhamer:
We hire tens of thousands of people each year as both we, as we continue to grow and as we expand our portfolio of services. And when we look at the overall demographic of our people, you look across the 300,000 people we have globally, or the 80,000 people we have in the Americas, it may be surprising to you or maybe not but the average age is in the late twenties—it’s around 28 years old.

And so as an average workforce age, that probably skews a bit younger than many other companies; perhaps it's because the number of people we hired directly off college campuses each year, among other things. And of course we have people that are younger and people that are older than that, so everything we design, everything we do for our people as part of the talent organization is incredibly focused on the diverse workforce, whether it's the age, ethnicity, backgrounds, gender, and so on.

Chris Pirie:
We've alluded to this a little bit, but it'd be good to know where you each fit in the sort of organizational model and how you collaborate and in what context you come together and work together.

Tal Goldhamer:
Our team is part of the EY Americas talent organization. So we have the pleasure of being part of our L&D team or learning team. And so we support all of our professionals, both our internal facing professionals and all of our external facing client-serving professionals.

Jeff Stier:
And I sit within the Americas consulting practice. There are different practices, as you've heard Tal allude to, and in the role that we play, we actually work across all of the practices, all of the service lines, because every organization, no matter whether you want tax, audit, or consulting, has a vision for the future, whether it's articulated or not. And many of the organizations, I would say about 30% that we're working with right now, also want to become purpose-driven. So we cross service lines, break down silos and work across the Americas.

Stacia Garr:
I know you mentioned, Jeff, that a few years or a number of years ago now changed its tagline, but I'm curious about purpose specifically, and if EY has an explicit purpose statement, and if so, what it is?

Jeff Stier:
We do have an explicit purpose statement, and it is ‘building a better working world.’ But the reality is, and this is true with most organizations, purpose comes from your past purpose is why you exist, it's the DNA of your organization. And the fact is for 150 years, EY has always served the capital markets or Ernst & Young before it became the why and helping to use the capital markets to build a better working world.

So it was unstated, but it was there. And as part of our exploration to become a purpose-driven organization, we excavated, if you will, that magic from our past and brought it forward to modern future, thus building a better working world, which is a phrase and a feeling and a belief that 300,000 of our people across the world now all know and can all articulate.

Stacia Garr:
So the tagline is the purpose statement.

Jeff Stier:
Well, I’d never call, but I'd never call a purpose statement a tagline, but the moniker with which we've come now is our purpose statement; the purpose statement has replaced the traditional tagline.

Stacia Garr:
Can you talk to us a little bit more about this focus on purpose? I know you just, you kind of went back into the past and pulled some of that forward into our purview, but what's the history behind it? What was the rational kind of argument for a greater focus on purpose?

Jeff Stier:
We've always been a purposeful organization, although without the clear purpose statement different people articulated our purpose in different ways. In different words, you could ask 300,000 people and you might've gotten a different answer—all rooted in the same concept, but not clearly articulated.

And that's the thing: purpose is that thing that gives us a feeling of great fulfillment and provides us with meaning and keeps everybody in the organization aligned and focused on what that is. So when you create a consistent vocabulary for all of our professionals, in this case a clear declaration of 'building a better working world,’ you know, every one of our professionals, regardless of where they live in the world. And regardless of what part of the business they're in everyone's using that consistent phrase with each other, with our clients and in our communities. And there's great power in having that crystal clear articulation and a set of words, that's common and it's meaningful to all of our people, our clients and communities.

Tal Goldhamer:
Can I add something there? By everyone knowing our purpose statement, it creates a golden thread–so no matter where you are in the world, what culture you have, whether you're a new employee or a tenured employee, what service line you're in and what work you do you come to work to do every day, we are all connected by the fact that we are all building a better working world.So you could go into a dining room in Japan, or in Brazil, or in Michigan, and begin to have a conversation, because that golden thread, the glue that connects us all, there's one thing we can say that does that is that we work at a company called EY that believes in building a better working world. And that is very powerful.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things I was most excited about when we were first talking about having you all on the podcast is that you all have been doing this for a while, but not necessarily as long as some of our other podcast folks, who have been doing this, like literally since the 1800s. And so what I want to know a bit more about is kind of twofold. One is, is this overall purpose journey, and then specifically something we've talked about a lot on the podcast, which is the Business Round Table statement in the fall of 2019 and how that's impacted your journey.

Jeff Stier:
I suspect that if you went back and asked the original founders, Mr. Ernst, Mr. Winnie, Mr. Young, whether they form their accounting company with a purpose and a vision of mine, the answer would be yes, of course they did—almost every new organization, every startup is founded in that manner.

And the fact that we have rediscovered and re articulated it is important now, particularly at this time in the evolution of business. I would say that if you look at a purpose maturity model with zero if you're just starting out in a hundred percent, if it's fully activated, the journey, it never ends. So I would always question if anyone claims that they're at a hundred percent and for EY, perhaps we're at 75%, we've realized that articulation is the start, but activation really is what matters. I call it the ‘say-do gap’. You could say the words, but if you're not doing it, there's know authenticity where we are truly being authentic and drinking our own champagne, when we talk about it, when we bring it to our clients.

The BRT statement, it was really nice to see; it was very natural for our current chairman to sign it along with about 200 other CEOs. And it validated for us that we were no longer, at least when it comes to big organizations, really big organizations, on the journey alone. And that there was really now a commitment to change the way people looked at, and accounted for, purpose.

In our journey, there were a couple of recent ‘aha’ moments that we realized that are very, very important. I alluded to one earlier that purpose alone is not a magic bullet and it never belongs in a conversation by itself; purpose + vision + long-term value, when you look at that equation, that is the power equation. That's the one that if you really want to make a difference in the world for all of your stakeholders, that's the equation that's necessary when you think about high strategy.

The second thing that we've noticed in our journey, the ‘aha’ moment is that if you want to be an organization that claims to be purpose- and vision-led, you need to be led by leaders who themselves are purpose- and vision-led, which means developing a platform and program around personal purpose and vision. And I really believe that Tal and EY are leading innovation globally around this, both how it fits in or what we call is nested organizational purpose envision, how you do it using digital, virtual technology at scale, and in embedding it into the DNA of how we build and train leaders and all of our people.

Stacia Garr:
I love that you mentioned that part, because we've spent a lot of time talking about the importance of connecting individual purpose to the broader organization. But I think you had mentioned this idea of kind of nesting, and that there's an intermediary, there's the team and the nests that you're in, if you will. And that's so important to connect the purpose as well.

Jeff Stier:
We do. Just on that point, we actually have data through our own internal surveys that show that pre some of the creation of nested purposes of our service lines and divisions, at some point the enthusiasm about being a purpose-led organization wore off and there wasn't as much incitement and or enthusiasm.

As soon as we began to create this nested idea, you felt that you belong to a unique tribe within the organization, and you could really connect your everyday work to building a better working world. How did someone in the customer practice come to work every day and do customer things—how were they building a better working world? That connection was really hard to make, but when you create a nested purpose at the functional level, and then more than that, understand your personal purpose and can align that with the daily work that you do in support of building a better working world, you really get employee engagement—you get employee productivity, and it drives innovation because now suddenly you could see how, no matter what role you have, even if it's at a junior level, the things you're doing are helping to build a better working world.

Stacia Garr:
I love how you're, you're basically sharing pretty practical advice on how to make this come alive in a culture and to come alive for individuals. Can you talk to us a little bit more about how you do that and kind of in the operational running of your business?

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah, it's a great question. It comes down to a little bit of what you were just talking about, Stacia, that’s really, the way we look at is proximity, proximity to the individual, you know, at the macro-organizational level our purpose is building a better working world. And we know that discovering and activating each person's personal purpose and personal vision is also important, but there's something in the middle there, right? It's how do you get closer proximity to the individual in the work that they're doing? And so what we were just talking about—of having nested purposes—many of our businesses and practices have articulated their own nested purpose, and that helps our people connect from their personal purpose to the nested purpose, and that's all in service to the overall purpose of building a better working world. Jeff had mentioned this golden thread idea, and there's also a really nice golden thread when you can articulate your personal purpose and personal vision, because we talked about personal vision is we think it's a really important dimension here, connecting that to a nested purpose of what your team, your broader team is doing, and overall connecting that to building a better working world.

So we think that's really important. I’ll just mention a couple of other things, which is we've had a lot of amazing support from some of our more senior, most senior executives, many of whom have discovered and articulated their own personal purpose and vision. And they've been using it in their communications and in their decision-making and talking about the fact that they've been using their personal purpose and their vision in their decision-making. And as we know, people's social model, right? Those around them and their leaders, so there's this natural movement that we see beginning.

And last thing I'll mention is we, a few years ago, we reimagined and challenged ourselves around what the attributes are of the best leaders. Many organizations have leadership models, so we took a step back. Our ours was good and it was fine a number of years ago, but less fit for purpose these days; organizational culture and workforces have changed.

And we said, we need to reevaluate. Imagine our leadership model and we put purpose and vision at the core. And we did that because we wanted it to serve as a reminder to everyone that it all starts with your personal purpose envisioned, because how do you lead others if you don't know how to lead yourself first?

And we use this in lots of ways, we use it from career conversations to feedback and even to promotion evaluations. So these are just a few examples how we're using our purpose operationally, influencing how we work and how we operate.

Stacia Garr:
I know that you've both mentioned a couple of times the purpose and how it's a little bit different than vision. And so I'm wondering, it seems like a good opportunity to kind of dive into that. So can you tell us a little bit about how you will see those things differently and related?

Jeff Stier:
Purpose? Whether it's personal or organizational, purpose is about what gives you great fulfillment. It's what gives you great meaning it's that, you know, that feeling that you get when you come home after a very difficult day and you still feel good: you might have had even a tough day, tough conversations or bad news or whatever it might be, but you still feel a feeling of fulfilment.

And the question is why do you feel that fulfilment? Well, probably because the work that you had done was very much aligned to your purpose, or as part of your organization, you accomplish something for your customers, your clients, or for the world. And that's rooted in your past—purpose is generally rooted in your past. It's based on origin stories.

Now by contrast, vision is generally a forward and future looking thing. It's a description of the impact that you as an organization or you as an individual want to have in the world. And that impact in that world is different for everybody. For some people, it's the immediate circle around them. For other people it's a bit of a wider circle and you know, yet for other people, it's the entire world, right? I mean, we can all think about people who we consider visionaries in the world and they truly are impacting the world. But you don't have to be a visionary to have a vision: you just have to have a view and articulation of the impact that you as an organization or you as an individual want to have in the world.

Tal Goldhamer:
For years, this idea of fulfilment has been questioned and what makes up fulfilment. And we think that personal purpose and personal vision and organizational purpose are part of what gives daily meaning to the work that you do daily. So in many ways, personal purpose is about daily meaning and daily fulfilment while I'm sorry, purpose is about daily, meaning daily fulfilment, and vision is about daily inspiration, inspiration about what that we have a hopeful or optimistic future.

And when you understand that you can wield these two tools, right, in the proper way to create the cultural mindsets, to create the strategies. But they're two very different tools when wielded.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I've never seen it described in that sort of temporal forward-looking backward looking where, but I really get it. There was another sort of definition question that it might make sense based on something you said, Jeff, something like purpose alone doesn't get you where you need to be. There's long term value and business operations. I can't remember. Could you repeat that piece for me and just maybe unpack it a little bit?

Jeff Stier:
So what I'm about to say might be a little heretical coming from a guy who built his career at EY by being the purpose guy, but here's what we now have come to believe. And I alluded to it earlier. The future is inevitable tomorrow. You and I, all of us will wake up personally, and we will be there tomorrow and tomorrow. Every organization has another day in the organization. It's unavoidable. It's inevitable planning for the future if you want to be successful is required, right?

Any CEO who's ever hired by the board, I guarantee you, although I've never been in any of those conversations has been asked, where can you take us? What can we do to get there? Purpose is completely optional, right? You can be a very successful person or organization if you plan for your future effectively and build the roadmap to get there. And we all do that in our lives, whether we know it or not. If in high school, you decide, you want to go to medical school, you know, you have to study certain topics, you have to get certain grades. You have to go to certain schools and you build a plan to get there. It's the same thing with your personal life now, each of you, all of us, and also as a business. But purpose is optional.

We happen to believe that organizations that will be the most successful over the long-term build both a purpose and a vision strategy—a future strategy because you have to, and a current strategy around purpose that is really important in today's age. Why? Because given the way Millennials and Gen Z value purpose, if you want to attract and retain those employees, you really better have a purpose strategy.

Given the fact, and I know we may talk about this later, but we're in the middle of a pandemic where the meaning of work and the meaning of life and the meaning of relationships has completely changed. People are looking for more meaning in their lives; people are looking for purpose in their lives today in a vision for the future, you better be an organization in our opinion, that has both—and that the best organizations balance being purposeful/cause-related/meaningful with having an optimistic view of where they're headed and what they want to accomplish.

Stacia Garr:
One of the things that we've talked about a bit with the research is how with these changing workforce dynamics and particularly some of the things you mentioned around the social justice movements and others, but also around things like gig work, where you can work any time, any place.

The question becomes what is the value of an organization to an individual? By joining an organization and putting on some level of the constraints that you have, particularly with a big organization, what do I get? And I feel like my answer, at least, to that question is, if it's a purpose-driven organization, you become a part of something that is much bigger than yourself that enables you to accomplish your kind of same purpose-driven approach, your personal purpose, but at scale. And to me, that seems to be one of the big reasons, one of the most compelling reasons to join a high quality organization.

Jeff Stier:
I think that's true, Stacia, if the company is doing their purpose gig, as opposed to just saying it. Because purpose is so popular today. Tal and I have coined a phrase, there's a lot of purpose malpractice that's going on. And purpose malpractice is when you'll attract an employee to go for the reasons that you just described. But when you get there, it's just not true, right? The covenant doesn't exist between the company and the person to deliver on the promise. What's the promise? You’re going to work hard for me as an organization, and I'm going to care about you, and I'm going to do things that demonstrate I care about you and how this is different from a gig networker, a gig worker typically they'll do the job for the organization, you’ll get paid and you'll move on. You know, companies with employees have a real opportunity—and this is one of the things that Tal’s team does in learning and development—is beyond my agenda. It's helped me learn things that I care about that are advancing my personal purpose, my personal vision, right? A work with clients who align with building a better working world. But the things I believe in helped me get in on projects that align that.

So I believe that we believe that the covenant between the company, when that exists and you join a purposeful company and they do for you what they promise and you do for them, what they promise, then you can really begin to change.

Stacia Garr:
Let's turn a little bit to the relationship between you two, and how you all collaborate and what opportunities are really created by aligning Tal, your internal perspective and mission with the customer-facing mission of Jeff.

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah. I mean, I think it's a really great and unique collaboration. We've built programs, whether it's to help with organizational purpose envision that we use internally for the various businesses within EY, and we've built personal purpose and vision discovery programs that we offer to all of our people.

And the key here is that with any programs, what often makes programs stronger is continual feedback. And the more feedback we get the stronger a program gets, and we've been running the programs internally for a few years. And then collaborating with Jeff, we began offering the same programs to our clients and with each offering of the program, whether it's internally or externally, we get more feedback and makes the programs that much better and that much stronger. We have the benefit of running the programs with thousands of people within EY which provides us with great insights on what works and what could be better than when we iterate the program, and we've done that many times and then offered it to clients and get even more diversity and more range of thinking around what works and what works well and what could be better.

And so we have the EY culture that informs the design, and then we have now the benefit of running the programs in many other organizational cultures and with each offering, we strengthen the program and continue to strengthen the programs. We learn something every time. So it's Jeff, I will share here, but it's fantastic.

Jeff Stier:
I agree. It's been an amazing personal journey for me and getting to both work with Tal and make an impact both ways. It's not usual that you can make the impact inside and out in that way, and both of us do that.

The other cool thing is this creates a huge competitive advantage for us and talking with clients. Why? Because when we're in pitches, there are very few organizations that are pitching or responding to purpose and vision and long-term value work that can actually say authentically and credibly, we're doing it ourselves, right? And we're going to be able to help you because we've stepped in mud before you, we've also done other things great before you, and we can help you both avoid those missteps, and accelerate the things where we know it works.

And so that is a real competitive advantage that this collaboration has been able to bring to our pitches and to our conversations with potential clients.

Chris Pirie:
Do you invite your customers to come in and experience your programs—do you go that far?

Tal Goldhamer:
We generally don't intermingle sort of participants meaning that when we offer for our people, we typically offer them as cohorts for our people. But the cool thing is we have an infrastructure in place, so when we're working with clients on, on projects and they have an interest in some of our programs, we're able to easily turn on and, and run programs for our clients. So we typically run them as separate cohorts. But the cool thing is it's essentially the same program.

Stacia Garr:
You had mentioned a few minutes ago, Jeff, that, one of the benefits is that you all can help folks understand what mud is not to step in and from some of the lessons learned that you all have had. So I'm wondering if you can share with us what are some of the challenges or some of the toughest problems facing organizations in the immediate future as they think about this? Or what are some of the things that you've learned along the way?

Jeff Stier:
Yes. So the things that I see personally, given the practice that we lead and the work that Tal and I are doing together, and particularly at this moment in time, as you ask, it's about wellbeing, it's about morale and it's about mindset and mental health.

It's a really, really tough time when many of the things that people thought were important to them and the perks are stripped away. So for example, for organizations like ours and others, where you have people who traveled a great deal and were on client sites, think about what you get from that. Well, when you travel and you stay in hotels, you get frequent flyer miles, and you get frequent hotel miles; when you travel and on your road, your company's paying for your food. When you travel and you're on the road, there's usually a group of people who you can hang out with and bond with, and it's usually a lot of fun. And if you are moving from engagement to engagement or client to client, you might also be paid to explore and experience new cities.

That no longer exists. And so it's stripped back to, I'm sitting in my apartment or my home. I'm on virtual calls all day. I'm being asked to perform in a world where I've never been taught to perform this way before, by having relationships. What am I doing this for? And so we're seeing both within and outside of EY, a real challenge to morale and motivation. And so the reason Tal and I are called in on this is because, if the organization doubled down on their vision for the future.

The natural state of human beings is to hope for a better future. And when we are in tough times, we always hope for a better future. The best CEOs of these times today are balancing being pragmatic about making money and doing things currently with optimism for the future. People need that as well. So doubling down on the purpose of your enterprise or your function, and then helping people understand their own personal purpose and vision, and then maybe having your leadership double down too, getting on your people's agenda, to help them understand that being within the organization, we can help you with your morale because we're going to move your personal agenda forward. Those are the biggest challenges facing us today.

And that's why the work that Tal and I are doing both together and separately is really, really called on more and more.

Stacia Garr:
It's interesting, because I was at Deloitte, I'm still in one of these social networks, Fishbowl. I don't know if you guys are, you know, I'm sure you do. And it's so true because I've been out of it long enough that I hadn't really thought about, you know, all the kinds of consulting perks and benefits and, and just the litany of people who are like, I'm not on the road anymore, I’m not seeing people! It’s so true and it's widespread across the industry. I really like how you're thinking about reframing it.

Tal Goldhamer:
And every organization that has a B2B Salesforce, right, is in the same boat, every single one and it's sector agnostic. So this is affecting a hundred percent of clients across a hundred percent of the sectors.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think about the role of L&D in the shift to a purpose focus? We talked about some very specific programs that you land, but how important is the role of L&D in a purpose-aligned organization?

Tal Goldhamer:
L&D could be a really great Trojan horse in serving up many different types of great development programs. From my discussions and travels with other CLOs, generally speaking, most organizations and the people in those organizations are well, they're learning organizations and learning people: people like to learn. That's a human thing, right? In general, people like to learn new things and explore new things and realize new things and find insights. So there is for the most part built in demand at organizations for L&D to come to the table with great content and great programs and purpose-envisioned discovery are interesting because they're not really learning in a traditional sense, we're not teaching people knowledge. I mean, there's a little bit of learning that's happening, but this is about self discovery; this is a more of a working workshop or working session. Cause we're not training people.

We view the role of L&D as having a role in helping people become better, right? Better performers, better colleagues, better leaders, better people, and helping people discover and activate their purpose and vision almost immediately makes them better in all of those categories. And of course, many complementary ways outside of L & D to also activate purpose. But you know, your question is about how the role that L&D teams play in bringing purpose and vision, it's helping people become better people.

Chris Pirie:
Tell us something about those programs and maybe some of the human impact?

Tal Goldhamer:
Sure—I mean, it's, it's one of the things that we actually love talking about, you know, it's the understanding that humans are the center of a purpose-driven organization. And if we unlock the power of personal purpose and personal vision within each of our people, it naturally supports and connects to an organization's purpose. In our case, you know, building a better working world.

Many people spend good chunks of their life, doing what we call ‘chasing purpose’. When we talk to most people at the average age of our professionals are somewhere in the late twenties or early thirties. And so they've grown up and they've come to the workforce, knowing that purpose is important in some way, but in having conversations with them they know it's important, but they don't know how they're going to go and find their purpose: you know, it's almost like they're going to stumble upon it in some way or come across it and something's going to click for them, and suddenly their work and their life is going to have a different meaning.

And then to tie it all together, you know, we talked about vision. Most of them probably haven't really thought about vision. You mentioned some, even the Red Cross, there's certainly a vision there that attracts people based on the impact that it wants to have. So we describe it as people are chasing purpose: we view it as our role as helping people be more efficient about it. We've developed the programs that help people articulate their personal purpose, their personal vision, and then figure out a way to actually activate it, put it into use and tie it into whether it's the nested purpose of the organization or the macro purpose, the overall purpose of an organization, the vision of the organization and a vision for their life, instead of people literally jumping around and hoping one day they'll stumble upon it; we're making it more efficient for them.

You asked about, you know, human impact and, and stories around people. I mean, the cool thing about the role and the work that Jeff and I are doing together is that we, if, if we do it well, we think we do it well. If we do it well, people are really excited because they've learned something about themselves that they otherwise didn't know.

In my case, I finally articulated my personal purpose and vision in my early to mid-forties. All right. Well, it would have been much more efficient for me to know that when I entered the workforce, and I would have been able to align more of the work and choose projects and do things. Sometimes you don't have a choice of what you're going to work on, but to the extent that you do have a choice, or you have the ability to influence it, it's much cooler to know that early on.

And so, as I mentioned, one of the cool things that Jeff and I have the opportunity to be the recipients of, is that as people go through these programs they love to come back to us and to our teams and share what they've come up with and how it's impacted their lives. So with your permission I'll share one or two stories, which you know, just recent stories.

So, the story of a woman that we heard recently of probably 80% of her job was unfulfilling, you know, 20% of her job. She really liked 80%. She didn't like so by all accounts, that's probably not a great ratio in terms of how you're going to spend a large part of your waking hours for most people. And so, you know, she went through the program, articulated her purpose, articulated her vision, and suddenly had a language and vocabulary that she was able to then use as a lens to look at the work she was doing, and then realized that the 20% is what really fulfilled her.

She realized why a filter, because the vocabulary gave her language to be able to use as a lens, and then sat down with her team leader and said, look, you know, here's the stuff that I really love about my job. I feel like I do it well. I feel like it gives me great fulfilment: I want to do more of it. And here's the stuff that I like less.

And she didn't say, I'm not going to do 80%, but she just said, here's the stuff that I really enjoy, and here's the stuff that really drives me. And here's the stuff that really doesn't drive me. Well, it turns out the team leader said, well, you know, it's funny that you should be bringing this up, because I've been thinking about expanding this part of our team, and it really aligns with what you're describing is your purpose, your vision, the impact that you want to have, would you like to take on more of this kind of work?

Of course the answer was yes! So suddenly, she reported that 80% of her job was incredibly fulfilling, incredibly meaningful to her, incredibly impactful for her and impactful for her team. IT totally aligned. And 20% was still stuff she wasn't really thrilled with, but it went from being 80% to just 20%. That’s an incredible story.

I'll give you one other one, And this is really about people feeling empowered. When you go through the process of discovering your personal purpose and vision, we've talked about, it gives you a vocabulary. And that vocabulary gives you a little bit of empowerment and confidence to share with others. And so we just recently heard a story of another team leader who went through the process, was inspired by it. Didn't know exactly what he wanted to do with it—not everyone has a clear view of how to put into use, but he sat down with his team and said, Hey, I want to share with you, we know a lot about each other, cause we worked together for a few years, but here's what really drives me. Here's what really motivates me.

And instantly, what happens when people share their purpose, even if they don't describe that it's their purpose or their vision, but when you begin to share it, its authenticity shines through in the conversation. You have no choice, but because you're being vulnerable, you're being authentic. You're sharing what gives you great personal fulfilment and the impact that you want to have. And the people on his team then went through the program and discovered their vision. And then they sat down and had a meaningful conversation, the most authentic conversation they'd been working together for years, and they came back to us that we now understand each other. We now appreciate each other.

The team leader said, you know what? I know when I have work that has to be delegated out. I know who I'm going to delegate what work to, because it's aligned with their purpose and with their vision. So these are two stories, but the great thing about one of the pleasures that Jeff and I have is being the recipients of being able to hear so many of these types of stories, because that's really what we were interested in is human impact.

Chris Pirie:
We have this whole poets versus quants sub-theme going through our podcasts, Dani, our engineer is not with us today, but I love the fact that this is really about language and giving people the constructs to have conversations around the stuff that's so important to us. It really is, you know, thinking about the future, collaborating effectively with others, telling stories—they’re deeply, deeply human traits. And I think that's why this is all so powerful.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. One of the things that occurs to me as you've been talking is if you think about the ‘I’ and the ‘B’ of that—the inclusion and belonging: if you have people who are like Tal’s story, be able to reform their work or to at least make the meaningful connections with others to understand this is who I am and this is what really drives me. That can only have a positive impact, I would think, on both inclusion and belonging.

Jeff Stier:
It does, Stacia. And this is where part of my personal purpose is to give everyone confidence to reach for their unique, remarkable. On the belonging side of it, and the inclusion part of it, if you understand that, no matter who the person is, they have a unique, remarkable and they have a fundamental right to exist in the world with their unique, remarkable. It almost should be built into the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence: then you understand that. I need to make room for these people to belong. Because frankly, and I remember when I was a kid when I was bullied, because I looked like I didn't belong. I went from a religious school to a secular school and I look like it. And who are you to tell me that, what do you know about who I am inside? Right? Nothing is the answer. This allows you to have that insight and to recognize that everyone has a place, everyone has something to contribute, everyone has a right to belong. And the companies and teams that appreciate and act on that are better off.

Stacia Garr:
I'm going to jump in and channel Dani and her engineering/quant side, because I want to be sure we get to this question–which is, we've been talking about all the amazing, in many ways, quality to have benefits of focus on purpose, but many organizations want to know, you know, what are kind of some of the metrics, what are some of the accountability measures that we might have: like Tal, you mentioned to knew that we've moved the ball forward on purpose, that some of the things we've done have actually worked. So I'd love to understand from, from either of you, how were you thinking about measuring purpose and the impact of it?

Tal Goldhamer:
People go through a program and discover their personal purpose and personal vision. We know when they've done that, and we can see on a timeline the before and after. And as you can imagine, as a professional services firm, we have lots of data; we love data and we analyse data—we’re analytics, or many of us are.

And so we can look at things like performance reviews, how their leaders view them, and people who have gone through and discovered their purpose and vision before they've done it. And after we have questions in our people survey, we do a periodic people survey and a question that we've asked is, do your leaders inspire you? And we can see whether or not people have changed their answer, or the trends in answers before and after somebody's gone through a personal purpose and personal vision discovery. Jeff, maybe you can jump in with some of the things that you've been working on.

Jeff Stier:
So for example, and Stacia, you talked about long-term value and you identified that earlier. In the EPIC report—and this is a global report that was contributed to about 40 organizations that manage assets of over $70 trillion—its goal was to create financial, quantitative metrics assigned to the creation of long-term value, of which purpose was one of them.

So let's talk about two of the drivers. One is employees. An employee is a driver of long-term value. And if you think about going back to the idea of fulfilment, when you understand your personal purpose and personal vision, and you feel like you're working for an organization, someone bigger than you, you are more engaged: and when you are more engaged, you are more productive, and when you're more and more productive, you lower the cost of labor. And when you lower the cost of labor, it drops directly to the bottom line, and globally, it's been agreed by these 40 organizations, and now everyone else who is sort of accepted at, by lowering the cost of labor and if you back it up, and if you work all the way back, you can get to organizational personal purpose as ingredients in helping that happen. There's a direct tie.

When you look at another driver, which is on the customer side of it, people who believe in what you believe in as an organization—customers, right—are more likely to purchase your products. There's also statistics that show that they're more likely to be loyal to you. And there's a whole bunch of statistics about what loyalty will bring to you: so for example, it lowers the cost of acquiring a customer, because you don't have to spend as much money with a loyal customer, very loyal customers, customers have the heart, emotional loyalty. And so there are clearly direct benefits when you believe in whether it's the case of an organization or the organization's leader and what they stand for, and you remain loyal to higher margins, lower cost of acquisition, higher retention, all drops directly to the bottom line.

I could go on about that in each one of the five categories that have been studied by Epic, there's a tie to purpose, long-term value, which means including vision, and a direct benefit to the bottom line.

Stacia Garr:
Did you all do any of this analysis internally? Have you been able to kind of show and see the impact of your journey?

Tal Goldhamer:
We have, and I would call it a journey, so we are doing it. And we're starting to see: we launched the program at scale about a year and a half to two years ago, so it's not something that flips and you start seeing the trends immediately; you need time. So we are starting to go through it, and we're starting to see things like the impact to leadership skills in performance reviews. We're starting to see the impact to retention. Cause again, as you discover purpose and vision, and you're able to like the stories I shared or one of the stories I shared, you're able to to adjust the work that you're doing. And sometimes it's just a matter of looking at your work differently and realizing why you enjoy your work and realizing what you'd be giving up if you were to change.

So we're starting to see the impact of retention and we're continuing to work on some of the other metrics, but we're, the trends are showing that they actually are having the impact we think it should have.

Chris Pirie:
We ask everybody who comes on the podcast this question; let me pick on Jeff first!

The question we ask is, why do you do the work that you do? Was there somebody or something that inspired you to focus your professional life on this topic?

Jeff Stier:
I started the story with you when I was in grade school, and I came to a school where I was different and my English class—I loved English—I read a book called Grendel, Grendel's of character in Beowulf, the epic poem. I don't know if you remember, but Grendel was a monster on the inside, but a human on the outside, but a human on the insight. And I, I love the story about Grenville because Grendel lived in the time of the Vikings and Grendel lived alone with his or her mother and only wanted to be human. And when he or she heard the Vikings celebrating would come and knock on the Mead Hall door because they wanted to celebrate and be with other humans, because it was human on the inside. And of course, when the Vikings opened the door, all they saw was this monster on the outside and would chase Grendel away.

And the thing that I appreciated was I felt like Grendel. I felt like I joined the school and they didn't look at the insight. And the thing I appreciated about Grendel was Grendel was tenacious; chased away always came back, knocked on the door again and again and again, and never gave up. And so my personal purpose is about being tenacious—that when people say you can't do something, I get the spark inside of me that says you can do it, and that to recognize, and I shared this before that everyone has unique, remarkable. You just have to look for it and you can't tell from the outside.

So that is my spark. And frankly, I did not discover that until I came to EY and stumbled into this role net tall and then began building the personal purpose program that what I do every day is to help people have confidence that they are unique—that don't worry about what people say, what they don't know, who you are. Let's discover who you are, look into, who you are, and then you can become really remarkable and make remarkable contributions to your team or organization.

So I love the work that I do everyday. It's very personal to me, because it goes way back in my story as a development of a human being.

Chris Pirie:
Great, just thank you Jeff for sharing. Thank you, Tal?

Jeff Stier:
I look back and I would say I didn't pick the role in the job and the things that I'm doing. I think, I feel like it picked me and you know, like Jeff you know, I shared my purpose earlier, which is to make things better for others so that they can thrive and in turn, make things better for others. No matter what I was doing throughout my career, I didn't have those words, but no matter what I was doing throughout my career, I felt great when I was making things better for others—whatever it was, whether it was in my personal life, my work life, I was feeling great when I felt like I was contributing to the world and get meaning from it. When I was helping make things better for others and they were thriving and they in turn can make things better for others.

And what you hear in that, hopefully, is a bit of a ripple type of effect. I like doing things at scale, doing things that will impact lots of people. I feel great when I'm having a one-on-one conversation, I'm making them feel better; I feel incredible when I do things that I know will have a ripple effect and help many, many people, because I love scale, and I love big impact and making things better.

And so when this role came about and this opportunity to be in this role, there wasn't a moment of hesitation. Why? Because I knew in the role that I had that I would be able to make things better for others. At the time, I didn't know that I'd be doing it through purpose and vision; I thought I'd be doing it through lots of other L&D initiatives and programs, which I still do. The purpose and vision is just a part of what I do.

So I feel like it chose me and I wish I didn't know about it, but I wish I would've had my purpose and vision earlier on in my career, because it would have helped me get probably to this path, into this role, that much quicker.

Chris Pirie:
Great! Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for the conversation today—I’m really thrilled that we managed to get you in our season: you bring a really interesting perspective to the conversation. Is there some way where people can tap into your work and find out more about what you do?

Tal Goldhamer:
Yeah. I mean, you could certainly find us on LinkedIn so you can look for us on LinkedIn. You can also email us directly. So my email is [email protected] and Jeff, you’re [email protected]

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful, thank you both; this has been inspiring, and I think folks will also be able to say, I can do that, which I think was one of our goals.

Jeff Stier & Tal Goldhamer:
Thank you very much.

Chris Pirie:
We're very grateful to the team at NovoEd for their sponsorship of this season. Global enterprises rely on NovoEd’s collaborative, online learning platform to build high value capabilities that result in real impact. With NovoEd, you deliver powerful, engaging, learning that activates deep skill development and drives measurable business outcomes.

You can access the research that we discuss here and a ton of other great research and insights at www.redthreadresearch.com—and you can subscribe to the podcast, of course, at www.learningisthenewworking.org.

 

 

 

 

Global enterprises rely on its collaborative online learning platform to build high-value capabilities that result in real impact, with its customers working to deliver powerful, engaging learning that activates deep skill development, from leadership to design thinking and digital transformation, as well as driving measurable business outcomes.

TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
You're listening to Learning Is The New Working—a podcast by the Learning Futures Group about the future of workplace learning, and the people helping define it.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
So Purpose is such a fascinating concept. It's so important and aligning people toward what's next for them. We do teach a lot about Purpose, and one of the things that we focus on is the way that Purpose has a role in a larger system of change.

Chris Pirie:
That's Suzanne Gibbs Howard; she’s the Dean of IDEO University—a learning resource for customers, employees, and fans of the world-renowned Silicon Valley design firm IDEO.

And this is an episode in our ‘Is Purpose Working?' season—a collaboration with Dani and Stacia from RedThread Research. This episode is sponsored by NovoEd: global enterprises rely on NovoEd’s collaborative cohort-based learning platform to deliver high-value programs with real business impact.

With NovoEd, you deliver powerful and engaging learning that activates deep skill development and drives measurable business outcomes. On March the 11th, at 10:00am Pacific time, NovoEd is hosting a live webinar where you can join RedThread Research founders Stacia Garr/Dani Johnson and myself to discuss what we've learned in our season exploring the implications for learning and talent management of Purpose-aligned organizations. We can't wait to meet you, and to get your questions and observations and experiences on the topic of Purpose alignment, as well as share our own reflections and research; we’re really looking forward to it. To register for your seat, submit questions and access lots of bonus material around all these episodes, including transcripts, please go to www.NovoEd.Com/Purpose.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard is a partner at IDEO, as well as the founder and Dean of IDEO U. It's a learning platform where anyone can learn to solve anything creatively. She describes it in our conversation as an “awesome mosh pit of learning and collaboration.” In five years, she's taken IDEO U from its initial concept to serving over 200,000 learners worldwide. As you'll hear, Suzanne arrived at IDEO via what she calls a “crooked path,” which involved anthropology, teaching English, working in tech startups, and pioneering many of the techniques at the forefront of IDEO’s practice today. She’s done innovation projects in public, private, and social sectors with clients, including the Gates Foundation, Ford, Google, P&G, and the Apollo Group. She hosts an acclaimed podcast called the Creative Confidence series, and she's a core design team member for Aspen Institute's First Movers Innovation Fellowship. She also serves as faculty for UC Berkeley Haas Business School’s Institute for Business & Social Impact.

In today's conversation, her passion for impact and change, education and innovation is writ large. We explore how Purpose and a mission to create a learning platform where anyone can learn to solve anything creatively shapes her work and her team, and scales the impact of IDEO to a worldwide community. We talk about the future of work, the future of learning, and the intersection between personal and organizational Purpose.

Let's listen in to our conversation with Suzanne Gibbs Howard.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Hi, my name is Suzanne Gibbs Howard. I am the founder and Dean of IDEO U, and I work for the larger company of IDEO.

Chris Pirie:
Suzanne, welcome to Learning Is the New Working. Thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with the audience today! I’m a huge IDEO fan, and the last three years of my life has been spent doing a lot of study around Design Thinking and that whole movement—it’s huge in the Learning space. So it's great to have you on the show.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Thank you; glad to be here!

Chris Pirie:
We're going to start with a few quick questions just to kind of sketch out your work practice for people, and Stacia is going to take the lead on that.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, thank you, Chris. It's great to have you on the show today, Suzanne. I want to start by understanding what part of the world do you live in, and why?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
So I live in San Francisco, California; for me, it’s a very deliberate choice. I started off living here because I needed to be in a place where I could find the stimulation and the kinds of work that I wanted to find in life. And San Francisco is a pretty unique city in terms of the kinds of opportunities that present themselves, the kinds of community you find there. But for me, it's that delicate balance between finding ways to create an existence and impact in the world, and also being able to escape this city really easily and get out to nature! Before I lived in Chicago, which wasn't quite the same balance for being able to get outside, so San Francisco is unique in that.

Stacia Garr:
Moving on, what's your job title, and how would you describe the work that you do with IDEO U?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
My title, officially, is Dean of IDEO U. So I'm a partner in the larger IDEO enterprise, which means that I'm constantly collaborating with all sorts of other people and leaders and companies in order to try to have a positive impact on the world. But specifically, with the IDEO U, what I do is I lead the vision and the strategy for our online learning platform. So our platform is focused on adult-learning professionals who want to be more innovative, more creative, more impactful with their work. And then thinking about strategy and vision, I'm constantly thinking about the things we can do to push ourselves forward so that we can help other people do the best work of their lives.

Stacia Garr:
Great. And for folks who may not be familiar with you all, is it primarily businesses who bring their leaders to come to IDEO or to do the work with IDEO U, or is it individuals like me who might say that sounds amazing. I just want to join up and learn. How does it work?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
It is an awesome mosh pit of all of those things at once. So one of the things that we know as IDEO that's one of our collective superpowers is this convening power—this ability to pull together incredible numbers of diverse people in order to collaborate with, and work together with, each other. And so it's exactly that same vibe on the IDEO U platform, so there are absolutely individuals who are there, who, like, just decided to take a course themselves because they wanted to make a change in their lives; there are also lots of people who are sent through their work. One of the things that gets me most excited are the teams who decide they want to learn something together, and so they sign up as a small team. And I think that's such an amazing social dynamic for the best learning.

Stacia Garr:
I think what's so cool about that is we were speaking with somebody who's at the D School for a different session, and one of my questions for that person was, you know, how do you scale what's amazing at the D School? And it sounds like in many ways, IDEO U is scaling what's amazing about IDEO and making it more broadly available?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Absolutely: that was really the impetus for doing this was that we were feeling extraordinarily limited. We saw such a hunger out in the world to learn more about these ways of working, and we couldn't meet the need or come anywhere close to it. And the kinds of experiences that we were creating for a small group weren't even the best; they were great experiences, but there were better ways to design for longer-term more deeper learning. And so that's why we wanted to get into this.

Stacia Garr:
Very cool. Well, you said that you are both a partner and the founder of IDEO U. How did you get there? What were your career steps to get to this current role?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I always describe my career journey as a crooked path, and I think that speaks to a lot of people whose journeys are crooked and don't make sense until you get to wherever you end up. But I started off studying cultural anthropology. I don't know why: I just loved studying people and culture, it was always a thing for me, and I was in a situation where I just could go deep on that. Especially what I liked studying was situations of high change, so in the cultural anthropology world, that ended up taking me to places like Zimbabwe, just post-Apartheid, a lot of change happening there. Situations in China and Tibet as China's economy was completely changing and Tibet was being pulled into a whirlwind of change situations, and the Middle East. So I've looked at all of those kinds of situations and thought a lot about how does change happen in a good way, in a not so healthy way, what helps to make people successful?

I did that for a long time and then realized that an academic career path wasn't quite right for me—it wasn't a place of high change. And I found myself out in Silicon Valley, right at the beginning of the early dot.com wave. So mid- to late-nineties, and fortunately, a crooked step on my path was I just saw that they were hiring anthropologists and people who could help with the study of people and culture to design hopefully better technologies. That was a way that I saw I could combine all of my passions, got on that train, worked in a couple of startups, eventually found my way to IDEO, and shockingly to myself, I've ended up at IDEO for 20 years, and I think that's because IDEO’s kept changing. So at first I did a lot of design research studying people and culture. Then I led a business unit where we thought about systems change; in the end it all culminated in the last six or seven years, where I could see something that took me back to my roots in wanting to teach and learn through the study of people, and I pitched IDEO to create IDEO U. And they said yes!

Stacia Garr:
That's amazing. Well, maybe taking that as a context, we'd love to know a little bit about IDEO and its relationship to Purpose, because that's what we're talking about on this season. So could you talk a little bit about, does IDEO have an explicit Purpose statement? And if so, what is that?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
IDEO is a Purpose-driven company, though the things that all 700 of us at IDEO think about are making change in the world in a more human-centered and designer-ly way. You know, we want to have a disproportionate amount of impact for the small group that we are with and through partnerships with others.

IDEO has been around for 40 years. We've worked on so many things—early days it was about what now seemed like simple technologies, like the first mouse, the first laptop. And as we wanted to tackle bigger and bigger problems and think about where design could actually help, we started to get into more systemic challenges, so how organizations need to change, how can we redesign the ways that people vote, not just the machines, but all of the systems around them, which is kind of a hot button issue right now. And so, IDEO was constantly changing. IDEO U is one of those things that was birthed out of IDEO. And so IDEO U’s Purpose as a result is to help us amplify and enable and unlock greater numbers of people so that they can solve their own challenges more creatively. You can see how our Purpose is intimately interconnected to the larger Purpose of IDEO.

Stacia Garr:
Right. All that very much so hits on something we've been talking about in this season, which is the connection between individual Purpose—so like you just said, unlocking people's capabilities and ability to solve their own problems—with this broader sense of Purpose of the mission of the organization and what it's trying to do.

Chris Pirie:
How does Purpose play out in the culture and the day-to-day operations and running of IDEO U?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
So with the IDEO U, we think a lot about how do we simultaneously catalyze our amazing team forward, and yet give them the freedom to do what they know is right, and yet have us all aligned. And so Purpose is really central in that: making sure that we think a lot about keeping people motivated. I mean, my goodness, over this last year, that's just so hard for everyone to stay motivated, to keep pushing forward, to keep carrying your work for it. The larger Purpose is central in that. So for us, it's all about our Learners and the people who are on our platform. This year, we broke a hundred thousand people having come and learned with us at IDEO U. And yet at the same time while that number is meaningful, it's really the stories of the individuals—when we see the shift that it's bringing to their lives, that keep us motivated, keep us aligned, keep us wanting to do our work.

So every week, we try to share Learner stories. One of the ones that really struck me recently is a woman who was in a storytelling for influence course, and her name is Geniah Stevens, she’s got this amazing not-for-profit in Wisconsin that is on fire to help people of color start their own businesses. And of course, even more so with all of the things that have happened with the next wave of social rights and civil rights in this country. And so when I hear Geniah’s story, and we all hear Geniah’s story and the things that she's doing and how she's putting that together, and the fact that our courses are helping to keep her fire lit, that’s what keeps us all going.

So culturally, we share stories like that one about Geniah regularly. And then operationally, we work really hard to translate that into critical metrics. You know, we are one of the most data-driven parts of IDEO because we have a digital product, and we can track so much. And so we're thinking constantly about what are meaningful metrics that show us that not only people came and consumed and signed up, but that they actually are learning something. So we spend a lot of times on those metrics each quarter, each year, trying to make sure that they're meaningful and aligned with our larger Purpose.

Chris Pirie:
I love it. I have a question to hear about illustrations and stories about your level of commitment to Purpose?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Yeah. Purpose always comes out strongest when there's a moment of strife. And this last year, of course, has been challenging for everyone. And so, you know, especially, whatever, nine months ago, when we all started working at home and it was a time where a lot of organizations around us were throwing up their hands and saying like, ah, give it up for the next few months—nobody’s going to get anything done! And we really challenged ourselves to go the opposite direction and to say, yes, we know extraordinary numbers of us have kids at home and are studying; we know that people are taking care of their parents right now; we know that not everyone has the right tack or physical setup at home.

At the same time, we have to do something to help our community. Fortunately, we were in a great position to do that because we are online learning. And so a couple of the things that we really lit a fire under ourselves to do, to stay aligned with our Purpose, were around finding the right way that we could make even more of our educational resources free for a certain time. So we have an introductory course to Design Thinking: we knew a lot of people, especially educators, needed that extra boost, so we made it free for a couple of months and have literally over 10,000 people, majority educators, coming in and taking this course from us so that they could just keep thinking about better ways they could redesign their classrooms.

Other things we've done: we’ve always had a scholarship program. That's always been important to us, because we wanted to be a for-profit social venture. And so we knew we needed it to be sustainable, but we knew there would always be people who couldn't afford our courses, even though they're the most accessible part of IDEO. And so our scholarship program is really dialing up to the next level, inspired by this last year. And especially, we're working to focus it on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the space of innovation.

Chris Pirie:
Just an aside here; it's been an incredible year for online learning. I think maybe 12, 14 months ago, many of us were evangelists, like trying to say, no, it can be good and it can be engaging, and it allows you to do all these things that you can't do by getting people physically together. Then all of a sudden we didn't have to evangelize anymore, because it was the only option for people. And we did see an incredible uptake on people taking MOOCs, and people just instinctively knowing that when in times of change, it's a good idea to get smart.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Definitely. I am sometimes just in processing mode and thinking about what is the right thing to do, and I think I was personally struggling with, yes, this is the time, but, Oh my God, it's so hard. And so when I did a bunch of reading and studying on things like the Bubonic Plague and looked at the fact that during the Plague, there were, yes, horrible strife, lots of death, but it was also the beginning of huge pivotal things like a public health system and medical ethics that really changed the face of the way society functions. And I do believe that this pandemic is that kind of opportunity, and especially in the space of learning and the ways we work,

Chris Pirie:
I guess the anthropologist in you must be going crazy right now. It's like so much is going, so much change is coming as a result of that.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Hi, I'm Geekily excited to see what happens next.

Stacia Garr:
So I want to talk a little bit about Design and Purpose, and so I want to understand how designers at IDEO, and specifically in the IDEO U context, focus on Purpose and its role in change.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
So Purpose is such a fascinating concept. It's so important in aligning people toward what's next for them.

We do teach a lot about Purpose, and one of the things that we focus on is the way that Purpose has a role in a larger system of change. Start with the way change normally happens; in a lot of organizations, change is very stressful and leaders have a lot of anxiety, and so they just want to get to the answer as fast as possible. Typically, the way that plays out in the organization is a restructuring of the org chart. ‘You used to report to him, now you report to her,’ all those kinds of things, new processes, and all of that can work.

But the problem that it has is that people aren't always bought in, most people don't want to change. And so you're kind of like playing with this rubber band and you're stretching it out as far as it can go. And as soon as you let go, it's going to snap back into shape because people aren't emotionally bought in. As Designers, one of the things that we think about is how do we get people emotionally engaged in that change. And so the way we do that is to study people, understand what it is that's making them tick—look for evidence in the organization where there are hot spots of positivity and great alignment, great motivation. We just instill all of that into a really simple statement that can mobilize and inspire people. And then we start people acting toward that statement. Before shifting the entire organization, we often have events, we have campaigns or contests to get new behaviors going, and have tangible examples of what good looks like.

Only after we start to get that, and we get people motivated, we get people mobilized, then does the organization shift. One of our best examples is with the company we were working with in India called Dr. Reddy’s: they are a huge pharma company, they had grown really fast, and as that happens, when you're successful, things were a little bit out of control, right? They had 20,000 people all around the globe, all these different divisions, all these different departments.

And so we worked with them to study hundreds of people and say, what is it that drives you all? Magically we distilled a statement that could work for everyone, ‘good health can’t wait’—and that got to like the immediacy and the urgency that they needed to reconnect with in order to get by all of those silos and boundaries that had gotten in the way of good stuff happening. And then we had a bit of a contest, a bit of a campaign to help light up new behaviors. And those new behaviors really started to kick in. First, it was small ways like people just stepping across boundaries, stepping out of their individual contributor, domain of expertise, R&D people getting so excited that they didn't wait for the process to bring a new medical technology to bear. And then over time, the systems developed and came in place so that those things could scale and truly impact a larger number of innovations that they could bring into the marketplace.

And so it's just those kinds of stuff: start with the humans, understand what they need, mobilize them around a common Purpose, let the behaviors follow. And then you shift the organization and the structures and the processes.

Stacia Garr:
Great. I want to understand a little bit more on that motivations piece, because I think that's a big part of what we've talked through this season with Purpose. As you all have done that work, how much of that focus on motivations has been kind of at the individual's Purpose level versus, I mean, we all have lots of different motivations, so versus kind of other types of motivations?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
It's that cascading effect of—as you were talking about at the beginning—there’s the individual and they're wrapped up in their team and they're part of the organization and that ladders up to the whole enterprise. Clearly, it needs to connect to something out in the world. And so I think what we're looking for in a lot of those situations is something that's more meaningful than just profit, clearly. But that can align across all of those different concentric circles. And so that's really the trick of it all—talking to enough people, prototyping, different statements, seeing what can strike a common chord across all of those realms.

Stacia Garr:
I'm curious to what extent do you all do that on a consistent basis with your own folks, particularly like you mentioned the difficulty of COVID and you know, everything you're doing and you know, the availability of one of your courses, like that's very Purpose-driven, right? So how do you all kind of intermingle what you do with folks outside the organization with what you do internally to keep people focused on Purpose and their connection and enabling that?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Yeah, that's a great question. It's lumpy, and I think it should be—right? I think if you were like, okay, it's Wednesday, it's time to check in with our Purpose. People would be really tired and they would expect that, right? So I think there's this creative and sensing process of knowing when things are out of whack and when it's time to check back in on those larger things, and at what level.

So for me personally, I think about it at an individual level. Like there are the people who I'm officially taking care of in our organization, and then there's just the whole team and their lives. And I'm a carer and a nurturer and a Mom, and so, you know, I'm constantly paying attention to people and thinking ‘who needs what?’ And I also have taken courses myself in coaching. So I love having coaching conversations with people.

So that's at the individual’s level, you know, what do they need? Are they feeling aligned? Is this the right time for them to step up and take on more in our organization? Or is this the time for them to leave and go onto something else? I think all of those things are valuable and great.

So there's individual level, then there's the level of the team and the group, and then the level of the organization, and those come up at different times. So for us inside of IDEO and IDEO U, we were already in a year of change anyway: we have a new CEO and a new COO. They are awesome, but that is a trigger for a moment of realignment and recentering on Purpose, and they're running that process. With IDEO U, we are growing and taking on more and more. And so it was an important time for us to say, is our Purpose still right? Is there something else that we need to get into?

And so we're just kind of figuring out the right times. This year was probably heavier on self-reflection on all of those three levels. And it's pretty hard to do it all at once. But I think as a result, 2021 is going to feel a lot more solid and stable.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, we’ve been talking about that: how there has probably been a greater focus on Purpose, particularly given how long we've all been working remotely and the pandemic and everything else that's gone on and how that seems to be kind of resulting in some pretty major shifts for a lot of people.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I think so many people as a result of being more isolated are reflecting more. There's a lot of existential crisis happening, understandably. And I think society's shifting, I mean the cultural anthropologist in me thinks that our Purpose was more driven through the workplace, and now that work is going to be much more remote, all that's up for grabs: identity, what’s the epicenter of your identity is going to shift, and where you get your Purpose is going to shift. I think the workplace is going to have to compete a lot more for attention from people if they're living in—I mean, I was talking yesterday to one of my employees, he's living at in Kauai and I'm like more power to you when there's a great set of waves out there or another course to design, how do I know what she's going to want to do most.

Chris Pirie:
This is one of the most interesting things that I've learned through this set of conversations is as we've all become sort of untethered to the physical places where we work, a lot of people are thinking about Purpose as the kind of glue that ties teams and organizations together. It used to be the physical building or the campus where we could express ourselves and be in our tribe, so to speak: now, people, I think, are experimenting a little bit around our Purpose and our cause. And our mission becomes really more important as you don't get to spend physical time in physical spaces together.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I completely agree. I think the thing that I'm stuck on, and that I will fully admit I don't know how to do yet is how to bring people together. And so I think that's really the trick is yes, we need more centering on Purpose that can align with people's lives, even if they're not in the same physical place… but how do we do that when people are tired of virtual happy hours and don't want another Zoom?

Literally yesterday, I was talking with a woman who's our chief of staff and who really cares for our culture about, ‘okay, how do we design a day or a week that is just pure fuel for people to keep them inspired and centered on the things we care about?’

Chris Pirie:
Can we pivot and talk a little bit about learning? Do you teach customers or do you teach customers, partners, and IDEO employees as well?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
It's all of them. So that epicenter, the place that we focus on most, is a community that's adjacent to our clients. I think that's the largest unserved population; they are a group of people who are hungry for learning who, for whatever reasons are not connecting to IDEO for consulting, whether they're, often times they're in a part of the world that we just can't field the team to get to or whatever reason they're not the kind of organization that hires consultants, great.

So that's the dominant group. At the same time, we also serve groups that are our clients. Some of the most exciting things for me are when we have a team, a consulting team, that's working with a client organization—we did this with our Purpose course fairly recently—they were aligning that organization around a larger Purpose. They knew they needed to collaborate with the client team very, very closely. And so to kick it all off, they took our Power of Purpose course. So then it's just like flipping the classroom. The conversation immediately gets to a higher level and they can work together better, and so that's something that we do and in some of our best cases.

And then once we got past making the basic courses, the foundations of Design Thinking series, we got to start making things that were the more cutting-edge sides of IDEO—so designing a business, designing strategy, cultivating creative collaboration. We’re creating a course right now on projects that take you through an epicenter of complexity—Purpose.

These are the things that our IDEO employees want to take as well. And so of course we can open them up to our own internal community all at the same time,

Chris Pirie:
I'm really interested generally in organizations and for-profit organizations that use learning as a way to, you know, share their goodness around their Purpose with a broader customer base. Do you think part of IDEO U's role is evangelism and sort of carrying the flag for the Purpose of IDEO?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
It is a part of what we're trying to do. The way we think about it is we want to be one of the most porous boundaries of IDEO, is the way we've often talked about it. We want it to be the most affordable, the most accessible, and still extraordinarily high quality.

In the beginning of this, it was very much about a for-profit social venture. That's a kind of a business model that I'm extraordinarily passionate about, because I think it's scalable/sustainable for the long haul. So while there are many aspects of IDEO that are more evangelical and straight-up brand and marketing, we're really trying to do something that spans a larger space and really truly the centerpiece of what we do is about enabling others so that they can do it themselves.

Chris Pirie:
I think once you teach somebody something or you learn alongside somebody, it creates a real special kind of relationship. Do you have a sort of alumni crowd out there?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Absolutely. Some of the things that make me the happiest are those kinds of relationships. And for me, just caring most deeply at my core about people and culture, I try to reach out to people when their story strikes me, so that I can hear a little bit more and those really natural dialogues.

So I keep conversations going. Yesterday, I was talking with one of my favorites, a gentleman who leads innovation in Saudi Arabia and a country over there who I would never know otherwise. We’re dialing up some new things for IDEO U that will work better with enterprise, so I'm using it as an excuse to reach back out to some of my favorite folks over the years. And really the center for us, like the ultimate heart of our endeavor, is a group that is our teaching team. In our courses, we have a group of about 25 people who like spanning the boundary. They're not full-time IDEO employees, or IDEO U employees: they are the instructors inside of our courses, live, facilitating the community, making sure things hum. And they are all around the world.

And so that community for me is one of the most fascinating groups that we can hear what journey they're going on, as well as, through them, understand the journeys of the hundreds of people inside of the courses.

Chris Pirie:
How do you think about the future of Learning and are there approaches or technologies that you're would like to experiment with?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Absolutely. Technically when I think about the future of learning, I mean the simple starting place, is that online is here to stay, right? We know that face-to-face is amazing. I thrive personally and face-to-face learning experiences, but it's not sustainable. The business model of K-12 education of Higher Ed and of professional development has been broken for a long time. And this last year really put the nail in the coffin, right, for all of those things.

And so now the good news is we can push things forward. It has to be a lot more than just MOOCs and recorded talking heads. We need to find the ways to truly, deeply engage people, because engagement is the precursor to learning. And that's why I land on community. It's not only community, but designs that bring community that brings social learning into that space are fascinating to me.

Technologically, I think there are going to be all sorts of innovations in the ways we can integrate data to inspire and motivate people in the right ways. I think it's a long way off, but I think AI will come in to provide more customized and personalized coaching for those experiences. I hope I'm here when that gets here, but I think it's going to be a really long time. Until then, it's going to be a lot of instructors and educators learning how to leverage the technology, the community, and the data, to truly deliver an experience that is tight, engaging, and yet moves people toward new behaviors.

So that's a lot of what I think about on the tech side; there’s a whole slew of other things on the career path.

Chris Pirie:
I think you have a cohort model for certainly some of your programs. There’s something special about learning alongside other people. What's the cohort experience been like for you?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
The cohorts are amazing. We definitely have courses that you can take anytime you want, and we know we needed those too. But I think that the super deep experience that we can provide is multiple times a year, we run each of our courses. We've studied them rigorously to know what people want or tend to want at certain times of the year. And so even though everyone will always say, “I just want it when I want it and I want you to have it available and I need to do it on my own schedule,” the fact is that we've seen time and time people don't show up unless there's a deadline.

And so we use a deadline for two Purposes. One is because it kicks people over the edge to actually start their learning experience. And the second reason is because then we can get a group of people who want to do it together. There's usually anywhere from like a few hundred people come together; the beauty of that is that they are all over the globe, but have a really similar mindset. They're all changemakers. They're all people who are on a path to make change. They all want to make a difference in the world.

And so that community really hums inside of the course. Our pedagogy, we talk about a cycle from see to try, to share, to reflect. In that share, we always say, go ahead, do your own work, but we really want you to share it back into our gallery and into our platform, and that's where the beautiful conversation unfolds. And so that's sometimes it's the teaching team, a lot of times it's the community, and they're giving each other feedback and connecting about what good looks like and how they can push forward together.

Stacia Garr:
It strikes me in just listening to what we're talking about is how we're now, what, 10, 15 years, maybe a little bit longer after that book Bowling Alone was published? And it feels like this connection to community and these cohorts is yes, it's filling a learning need, but it's also feeling a broader need that we have for connection with others. Who what you just said, you know, you said these people are all over the globe, all changemakers, they've got this community and by sharing, they're contributing to this community, they're building it; it’s not just that they're there, but they're building it together in a way that I would imagine, you know, connects them and really capitalizes on the technology and the capability that we have now, as opposed to kind of the other side, which is this, you know, increasing isolation of these times. So it really strikes me how this is a solution for this moment in many ways.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Absolutely. And it's also just good fortune for us; I think we often talked about the people who were resonating the most with their learning experience as these Lone Wolf innovators but we know that Innovation and Design Thinking are so great when you have a community around you, but there are so many more people around the world that don't have the community around them, and that want to make change then are living in these little communities.

And so, how do we help to unite that collective across the planet? I think that has been when I literally just got tingles thinking about that—that these are the people who can come together and they're stronger because they have other folks with them that have their backs. That is one of the most common stories we hear from people is that I thought I came for the learning, but where they really took away was the community. And now I have these new people around the globe who are with me through my career, not just through a five-week course.

Stacia Garr:
We're starting to get a little close on time, but we did want to make sure we talked about kind of what has happened this year. And I know we've woven it into this discussion, but, maybe go at it a little bit more directly. As you think about the COVID-19 pandemic, the calls for social justice, the social strife that we especially have had here in the United States, how have you seen those events impact your operations and your work?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I mean, where haven't they? Right? In our work, I think one of the shifts that started to happen was before, before coronavirus, before all of the chaos that is 2020, we really thought a lot about the epicenter of what we were teaching was Design Thinking, Innovation and Leadership. We always knew that we had a slew of larger skills that were kind of abstractly about things that'll keep the modern workforce successful, you know, so we call these the power skills. They're all the things like creative problem solving, collaboration, communication, empathy, and one of the things that I talk about like a broken record is navigating ambiguity. You know, that we always know like the pathway to innovation, the pathway to doing good work is being able to know how to make progress even when the path is unclear and nobody's ever done it before.

And oh my God, 2020 has just brought that to the center—so instead of that being something that we talk about on this side, we know now that people, no matter what they do, no matter where they are, no matter what they're working on, and especially if they're working on issues related to the pandemic or this next wave of civil rights, they need to know how to navigate ambiguity.

They need to know how to collaborate with an extraordinarily diverse community of partners, and that's the only way that they're going to make progress. And so we've really dialed-up those kinds of courses in our portfolio—things like cultivating creative collaboration are really, really popular right now. Things like looking at yourself in the Power of Purpose are also incredibly popular. Those are the types of things that we're trying to pull to the front of our efforts so that we can help people who are on the forefront of these super-tough challenges.

Stacia Garr:
I love that you pulled out that it's one of these power skills is collaborating with diverse communities of partners. We do a lot of work on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, and we've been kind of overlapping that with some of our skills research and some of these other areas. And so we've been talking about how do we enable, cross-organization, exactly that—that collaboration with diverse partners whether they're in your organization, outside your organization, et cetera. And so to hear you say, you know, that's what you're hearing too, is kind of one of these superpowers that we need to have, is I think really reinforcing what we're seeing in the research.

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Absolutely. I mean, I think that's, again, one of those things that we know and then the how to do it is still so hard. We know a lot about how to bring those communities together, how to invite them to participate. I think the next wave on things truly being more equitable is those subtle dynamics of how we work together, making sure that all voices aren't only heard but truly integrated.

That's a huge space where I know I have a lot of learning to do in the coming year, and we're starting to design some learning experiences around that, first for ourselves. Hopefully, it's something we can benefit from and start to bring out to the larger world as well.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think that touches nicely into another question we had, which is as you look at these changes and you'd said earlier (beautifully) that, you know, you stayed at IDEO for 20 years because IDEO has changed; it’s been a place of change and obviously you have changed too. So as you think about the next year, next couple of years, what changes do you foresee kind of impacting the future of your job or the type of work that you do?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I guess a couple of things come up. For me personally, some of the things that I know we've talked about a little bit already, that I think how we bring community together when one thing I feel very confident about is nobody's going to return to the office for a 40- to 60-hour work week.

I think businesses are going to be all over the place with that. I think our community will work in waves. I think we'll come together at certain times; we’ll be apart at certain times. And so I am fascinated with how that's going to come together. I'm clueless about how to navigate it well, but I think that's going to be a huge learning path.

And then I think for myself personally, I know that I need to just keep checking in with my own Purpose: keep aligning with that, keep understanding where it's going to take me next. And so I think I'm very open on some of those things, because the world around us is changing so fast.

Stacia Garr:
Well, that brings us to one of our final questions in a beautiful way, which is about your personal Purpose. So we want to know why did you choose this line of work that you do? You kind of talked about the crooked path, but like if you kind of step back and think about today, from where you are, what is it that keeps you doing what you do and what kind of inspired you to want to do it?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I do spend time with myself thinking about these kinds of things. I have something that I kind of call my “personal blueprint,” that is literally taped up on the walls of my little office at home. I ask myself a set of questions again, not every year, but at times of great change or when I feel a little off-centered, and so those questions I share with lots of other people. So I ask myself, you know, what do I value—has that shifted at all? I asked myself, what am I amazing at? And I think for most of us being humble, it's better to ask that to other people and have them tell us what we're amazing at. I asked myself, what can’t I help myself from doing no matter what my job really is supposed to be? Everyone has that—you might have a completely different job title, but you're going to do some of the things exactly the same way.

And then the last question is what don't I want to do? I could do it or maybe I suck at it, so I just don't want to do that. And so those four questions about values/superpowers/can’t help it/No-Gos are a series that I check in with pretty regularly. And so I came up with those a couple of years ago when I was starting to think about, is it time for me to leave IDEO, or is there something there for me? And these four questions eventually led me to starting IDEO U. And so they also helped me drop out of a PhD program, so they can help you right your crooked path.

Stacia Garr:
That’s wonderful. Is there anything we missed, anything we should have asked you about your current work or past work or anything that relates to organizational Purpose that you want to share?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
I think we've covered everything. I think it's just all about finding that shared alignment between your own personal Purpose, the Purpose of the immediate group around you, that you're working with on a daily basis, and the Purpose of that larger organization.

And I think the goal of most people in their career path beyond just surviving and making enough money to get by, hopefully, is around finding the places where they can hum on all of those levels at once. I guess that's the gift, if you can get it all right.

Chris Pirie:
Amen to that. Suzanne, thank you so much for your time today and your insights. What a cool job you have!

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
Thanks.

Chris Pirie:
Where can people find out more about your work?

Suzanne Gibbs Howard:
The best place to go to is IDEOU.com; there are plenty of free resources there. We blog a lot, and I also have a podcast called the Creative Confidence series. Those are all free to anybody, anywhere. On top of that, we do have a bunch of courses! We just started a round of our cohort courses yesterday; the next set will be running in early March. And I think for this crew, the Power of Purpose is one of our courses that's always available, so people can come and check that one out. If you're interested in more things about finding your own personal Purpose, finding the Purpose of your team or your organization, I think that course can be very helpful.

Stacia Garr:
Wonderful—we can put a link to it on the website and help people find it. Thank you so much.

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TRANSCRIPT

Deborah Quazzo:
It's Deborah Quazzo, managing partner of GSV Ventures and co-founder of the ASU+GSV Summit. It's hard to remember what day it is these days, but it's October 14, 2020.

Dani Johnson:
Hi, I'm Dani Johnson and I'm here with Stacia Garr. We're the co-founders of Redthread Research, and we're collaborating with Chris Pirie on this purpose-focused season of ‘Learning Is the New Working.’ And today we have Deborah Quazzo with us. Deborah, thanks for your time. And for sharing your insights with us today.

Deborah Quazzo:
Thank you.

Dani Johnson:
We've had the opportunity to participate in your conference, your ASU+GSV conference for years. And this year, I know that the conference was virtual, but I heard you say that something like 27,000 people registered.

Deborah Quazzo:
We had a large registration, yes.

Dani Johnson:
It was great. I was thrilled to run a session on coaching, and Stacia and I both had the opportunity to listen to your Ladies Lunch session with Gloria Steinem as well, which we thought was amazing. And so you've introduced us to some really fabulous and interesting technologies over the year end, where we're thrilled to have the opportunity to chat with you today throughout the year.

Stacia Garr:
So, Deborah, we're going to start off with some quick questions to introduce you and your work practice to the folks who are listening. We're also going to be touching on your organization and career history. So just to kick us off what part of the world do you live in and work in and why?

Deborah Quazzo:
I live in Chicago most of the time. I don't think I've ever been here this long. I live on an airplane two or three days a week minimum, but I've been very much here with my husband and the cat, occasionally my children. And we also have a home in San Francisco, so we do go back and forth a little bit in normal times. But we moved here many decades ago. Downtown Chicago is a great place to raise children for someone who wants to be in an urban setting, which I did. And we did. And so our three kids all grew up here on Lake Michigan and went to school here and one of them moved back.

Stacia Garr:
Well, that's a success, right? To get one of them back?

Deborah Quazzo:
It is. Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
So then can you tell us, what's your current job title and how would you describe the work that you do?

Deborah Quazzo:
Yeah, I think that my current job titles are two things. It's a, the managing partner of GSP Ventures, which is our venture fund focused on education technology, primarily early-stage investments, although some portion of the funds later stage investments, and co-founder and sort of general manager of the ASU+GSV Summit that you all referenced a little bit earlier. We view them as part of a platform where we're singularly focused on the education technology sector globally. And we view the ASU+GSV Summit as a flywheel for our investment activity and vice versa. So we typically would have 5,500 people live in San Diego for the summit. As you pointed out, Dani, we had, ended up with 33,000-some registrations for the summit we've had. So the virtual move was really actually fascinating and fun. And we do view them as the two organizations is sort of inextricably linked although they’re separate teams and all that sort of stuff. But they do drive each other all around education innovation.

Stacia Garr:
And we have a lot of learning or HR professionals who may not have much exposure to kind of the venture capital and the investor world. Could you just kind of simply introduce what you all do and kind of how that then flows through to something they might see like a degreed product, for instance?

Deborah Quazzo:
So we look at the education space as a Pre-K to Gray arc of our continuum of learning and workforce skills. So we look for investment all across that spectrum. Obviously, there's only a part of that spectrum that's relevant for HR leaders or L&D leaders, et cetera. And that would be both higher-ed and adult learning, workforce learning, enterprise learning. We are investing in companies, in Seed and Series A companies, in all those sectors although we have plenty in the, and I say higher education and workforce, because I think as most everyone at this point who is in those important jobs realizes that there's a very much a coming together of the higher education and the workforce sector.

Deborah Quazzo:
These are continuums, they are not siloed on the historically. They've been very siloed, K-12 silo, higher ed silo, workforce siloed. I think it's a very positive development. The siloing is being, you know, very much broken down and, you know, one feeding into the other and vice versa in a lifelong, in a movement to lifelong learning which I think is also something that was not embraced for a long time and is very much been embraced today. So we're looking at, we're biased towards platforms. So Degreed, for example, in the enterprise space is a platform. They're content neutral. And they sit in the enterprise and they help companies and their employees look at, you know, make skills, assessment, personal skills assessments, and then direct them to personalize learning pathways that can enhance their career mobility actually at the end of the day. But it's an open-ended, you know, platform in the enterprise market around learning. We're also in Guild Education, which I think is a really important provider of this sort of creating this continuum between higher education and the workforce. They have an enterprise platform that is basically supporting enterprises and delivering higher education to their employees and in this case, frontline workers.

Dani Johnson:
Kind of along those lines, Deborah, I mentioned that you have introduced us to some really interesting technologies over the year. What are some of the broad trends you're seeing around learning technology and especially for the workplace that CLOs and talent leaders should be paying attention to?

Deborah Quazzo:
What are we're seeing? We're seeing all kinds of trends and I'd actually say this one trend, the continuum between formal education and the workplace, and that, you know, we actually view the workplace as sort of art today or fourth education system, and that you have early childhood or K-12, higher education, and work is now school and vice versa because of the need to upskill and reskill and address all these things. We're seeing other trends like we have a theme called ‘Hollywood Meets Harvard,’ which is just about driving better learning engagement. I mean, how do people improve learning experiences so that employees are more engaged and more likely to learn? We're staying at modernization. I think I've introduced you all to Athena, but that's in the compliance space around harassment issues.

Deborah Quazzo:
And it's a very, very modern delivery of learning. It's received incredible uptake by some really great companies. So I think they're very big trends around things like that. Knowledge as a currency is another theme we've had for a long time, which is really that you know, your sort of formal degree or whatever that you got out of our traditional system is no longer enough. You've got to have lots of other things that flow liquidly, whether it's certificates, whether it's badges, whether it's whatever, that people are going to need other learning credentials and to give them additional professional currency as they move forward. So we're seeing a lot of I think very fruitful trends.

Stacia Garr:
So a lot of what you shared in many ways could be seen as purpose-driven, you know, this focus on education Pre-K to Gray, et cetera. But does that part of how GSV Ventures operates? So do you all have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, what is it?

Deborah Quazzo:
Yeah, so we have a very formal, the way we look at comp– We've always had a framework for the way we looked at, look at companies, we call it the Five Ps, something we've used for over 20 years. And it's basically our framework for evaluating every investment that we make. So the first P is People. Obviously, there's no shortage of great ideas, but if you don't have the right people executing, you will fall flat. Product: the products obviously got to be differentiated and an important. Potential and Predictability. And then the fifth P is Purpose. So we are actually not an impact fund. I mean, we don't label ourselves as an impact fund, but we do believe very, very strongly that every investment we make has, if it doesn't have impact, it's not going to have financial return.

Deborah Quazzo:
So, and that's particularly relevant in the education market. And if you aren't addressing enough learners and then you aren't having the kind of impact that's going to really change things. So we do have a strong commitment. We also believe that companies with purpose have stronger cultures and are going to inherently have stronger outcomes. And so it is a very explicit commitment on our part. And certainly there are plenty of companies in the education technology space that basically, you know, address a very small part of the market and perhaps a very high-income part of the market. And lots of people will make very, have made and will make successful investments there, but that's not an area we pursue.

Stacia Garr:
And just again, for our listeners’ sake, would you mind just clarifying kind of the difference between an impact fund and how you characterize yourself?

Deborah Quazzo:
Impact funds are now a very formal and growing category of private capital, and they can address a whole host of areas. They could be green technology, they could be ag. food culture, they could be–but education is an area where there are a number of funds that are impact funds. They have stated returns that they have to deliver against impact that are provided by the funders of those funds. Sometimes impact funds have delayed longer, longer time horizons for returns and lower returns thresholds. The important thing for us is that we want to be a market-return-driven fund. So we want to be the most successful education technology company fund in the world, but certainly our objective or, you know, on behalf of the people who who've supported us and backed us through their LP investments. And we do believe that if there's an extenuated return profile or a term profile, that's longer than a market return profile, it's then perhaps the organization's not having the kind of impact we need it to have. So we want to be a market-return-driven fund. So we want to be, you know, comped against venture capital funds that are doing the same.

Stacia Garr:
And that's the reason I asked you to kind of clarify that is one of the themes we've had going through the podcast has been this question of organizations or in your case funds that are directly focused on purpose versus those that kind of incorporate purpose into all of the other things that they do. You know, more akin to the stakeholder capitalism model versus the shareholder capitalism model. So I think it's really interesting to kind of see that you're thinking about that in a similar way to what we've been talking about across all these different organizations that have been on the podcast.

Dani Johnson:
So Deborah, we know that a lot of your technology, I mean, almost all of your technology is education focused. You've also introduced us to a few that are more diversity and inclusion focused. We know that's very intentional. Talk to us a little bit about how your organizational purpose shows up in the work you do. And I'm thinking specifically, because I just participated in the ASU+GSV conference. It's always very aspirational. You work very hard to make it inclusive. So talk to us a little bit about that.

Deborah Quazzo:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you. We have worked really hard really the whole, for the whole 11 years that we worked on the summit. So our mantra is that all people have equal access to the future through innovation, scaled innovation in education. We believe that equity and access are critical threads that have to run through that, or we're not going to get to, you know, we're not going to get to the end goal of all people having equal access to the future. So we leverage the ASU+GSV Summit to really talk about many of the, talk about lots of themes and we have artificial intelligence or whatever. But one of the really important threads is equity and access. So this year we had a full day dedicated to truth and reconciliation and a series of conversations, and actually two full—a day dedicated to it and the second day, it was one of the channels. And we had everyone from Isabel Wilkerson who just wrote the extraordinary book ‘Caste’ that Oprah is actually very focused on.

Deborah Quazzo:
And if you haven't read it, you ought to read it tomorrow. It's just such a one of the best books I've read in a long time, to Eddie Glaude, a Princeton professor just wrote a fantastic book called ‘Begin Again’ about James Baldwin to Michael Sorrell is the president of Paul Quinn, a HBCU has actually been ranked as the best HBCU three years in a row thanks to Michael's leadership that had fantastic talk. So we really are incredibly intentional. We want to make sure we will keep getting better, but we had 153 panels and every single panel had a woman or person of color on it. And that number of those panels had all women or all people of color. So those things are really important. It's really important that we're reflecting real life, and it's real important to the conversations that we're reflecting real life.

Deborah Quazzo:
And then we hold a host of other events. Like we gave two amazing men, Nate Davis and Carlos Moreno, the Innovator of Color Awards this year. They're both incredible people who've done a great work. One’s a CEO of a K-12 dot com public company, the other is the CEO of Big Picture Learning, which is a very extraordinarily progressive school, global school manager. And then we have a Power of Women awards. And so we really do work very hard to elevate issues of equity. We're also really fortunate in that the sector does attract entrepreneurs disproportionately in a positive way who are women and people of color. So we invite, you know, 400-ish companies, CEOs, or founders to present every year at the summit. Actually this year, we had a competition where people applied and got the position through a competition. And every year, a third of those companies are founded and/or led by women, a third to 40%, somewhere between 34 and 40% is where it kind of moves between. We'd love to get it to 50%, but we feel very good about the 34 to 40. And then about, about a quarter of the companies are founded and are led by people of color. So, you know, very proud of our sector that it's got that kind of diversity, that those numbers reflect in leadership, of innovation leadership.

Stacia Garr:
I want to move this on, Deborah, to talk a little bit about some of the changes that we've seen with regard to purpose, and I kind of alluded to this shareholder capitalism versus stakeholder capitalism. And when talk specifically about the Business Roundtable statement of purpose from last fall about delivering greater value for all stakeholders and the move away from shareholder primacy. So when we get your perspective on that statement, you know, either then, or in the year that's happened since then.

Deborah Quazzo:
You know, there's certainly recently been a lot of criticism of whether that was just–not enough actions followed on that recently I feel like. But I think, you know, it's interesting to me, I mean, I actually think it's not unlike what I said about, we're not an impact fund, but if we are, if every investment we make is not high impact, then we're going to fail financially. I actually think that, I mean, the way at least we were, we think that you should be able to address you, you have to be able to address all constituents in our organization to have, you know, to have successful financial outcomes for all the constituents in the organization, whether you're an employee or a shareholder.

Deborah Quazzo:
And we're fortunate to have companies in our portfolio that actually really support things like, you know, support elements of that, like Guild Education actually. Where companies like Wal-Mart and Disney and Chipotle and Waste Management and others are really making massive commitments to educate their frontline workers who either, you know, have from everything from a high school equivalency certificate up through full college degrees and then through certificates and skills related to skill accretion. So I think elevating learning within a corporate setting is a really important piece of this because it's such a fundamental way that companies can show their commitment to their employee stakeholders, but it's also going to have benefit for their shareholders stakeholders and their, you know, all the way around.

Deborah Quazzo:
So I think there is a path here where you can elevate financial outcomes through doing the right thing for all of your stakeholders, and, you know, it's just delightful to be able to sit in the seat that we all sit in where we can watch learning be applied as sort of a weapon in a positive way by corporate leaders to get at those objectives. It's an important weapon and we're seeing for the first time, and we can see it in right now, we have exposure to a lot of corporate learning companies, and we're in a recession, depression, whatever you want to call it.

Deborah Quazzo:
And typically, corporate learning companies would see massive degradation in their revenues during down economic downswings because it's the first thing that companies cut. We're not seeing that. Obviously, if you're laying off half your workforce, you're just not going to have as many people in seats to take learning, to you know, to consume learning. But learning as a furlough benefit has come into play for the first time ever during this pandemic. People are working on learning as a layoff benefit. We'll see where we get there, that will probably require some other, you know, additional structuring like government help and things like that. But I think it is, really it makes me feel optimistic that as opposed to being the thing, you know, the thing that was dispensable, you know, easy to dispense with first, when you had to cut things, it's actually being now viewed as, at least by many companies, increasing numbers of companies, as a weapon to improve overall outcomes.

Stacia Garr:
And can you explain a little bit more what you mean by learning as a furlough benefit? What does that look like?

Deborah Quazzo:
So, through tuition reimbursement, tuition benefit plans that support, you know, that provide tax advantage support for delivering learning to your employees. Those have been, you know, actually Guild sort of led the way in creating a similar, you know, because furloughed employees are still, technically employees are on furlough, but companies like Disney when they went, you know, because they had to furlough such a massive chunk of their company, actually elevated their learning benefits to those furloughed employees. I mean, they elevated the visibility of them and they encouraged their use. So it's extending the concept of learning through tuition reimbursement, tuition benefit plans into the furlough cycle.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. With the idea being that they can take advantage of this time, where they're not working to learn and to develop.

Deborah Quazzo:
Precisely. Yeah.

Stacia Garr:
I want to kind of zoom in a little bit on this more specifically for you as an investor. So as I understand it, when we're talking about stakeholder capitalism, it means, you know, we're not putting the shareholder first we're at least equally considering employees, customers, suppliers, partners, even society at large. Has that influenced you when you've thought about investing in companies that are kind of explicitly stakeholder capitalism companies because it, it might mean that other people get kind of benefits before you as a shareholder in the company?

Deborah Quazzo:
We're typically investing very early, right? So we're investing in startups. And so that probably makes a difference because we just, you know, we don't, number one, they're not making money for the most part, they're losing a lot of money. And I do, you know, one thing that we do believe passionately in—startups give you an interesting case. We had this in our recent investment where, you know, someone was, you know, the team, the founding team, it was white men. And we raised, and other investors that came along with us, raised the need to address issues of diversity now. And that is hard when you're starting. If it's not obvious or easy and because your team isn't it, it's hard to add one more thing to early-stage startup menu, but you have to.

Deborah Quazzo:
Because if you don't start early, it's very hard to recover later. So we had a really good conversation about it, and the company went out and took immediate action, which was great. When you're dealing with early-stage companies, it's really about how are they building their culture to address issues of equity and access out of the gate because that will make a very different company down the road. So it's hard. The Business Roundtable obviously is big companies, so they're thinking differently than our business, you know, they can think differently than our businesses do. So what we're trying to do is help companies think about exponential growth. What we strongly support is the idea that exponential growth can be best accomplished with, you know, through not only a great idea and a great technology and everything else, but it can be best accomplished through diverse teams and being very intentional about our support of that and in our monitoring of that, frankly. So I think that's kind of how we as early stage investors have to think about it and act on it. And we're pretty active. I mean, we're active in the whole area of female VCs getting funded, female startups and people of color startups, founders getting funded. All of those groups are still underfunded. The category I sit in is a woman, a female, we're a female-owned firm and a majority female-run investment or equal 50-50 equal investment committee, female male. So we're pretty passionate around these topics and carry that over into our portfolio company, construction and management.

Dani Johnson:
We love that, Deborah, about you and the organizations you pick. I'm kind of curious about, I mean, we talked to a lot of startups as well, and we have noticed that they skew white and they skew male. There is about how much of a luxury purpose is when you're doing a startup. And I know you might be a little skewed because you look for those that are actually going after purpose as well, but sort of, as you look at the broad landscape of things, is purpose something that most entrepreneurs are considering?

Deborah Quazzo:
From where we sit, you know, I've picked an area where purpose is so important, right? And so I'm a bad person to ask because we're operating in places where entrepreneurs are generally trying to change the world and have big impacts. They’re certainly trying drive financial returns, high financial returns, but they're, but they really are trying to have massive impact at scale on learners, across this Pre-K to Gray spectrum. And certainly there are entities I referred to before that within the education technology sector, they're not going to have purpose. That's just not where we operate and it is hard for me. A long time ago as a general investment banker at Merrill Lynch, it would be hard for me to get out of bed every morning if I didn't align with founders who really had, you know, had purpose at their core.

Dani Johnson:
Do you have a sense for purpose-driven organizations versus maybe the rest, as far as success goes?

Deborah Quazzo:
We believe that and we believe this has become more relevant this year. It's become more relevant over the last few years, you know, it's generationally more relevant that purpose-driven organizations are and should have higher performance. And because it's just going to mean that you've got a better culture, you've got people who are more committed in your culture. They're going to work harder. They're going to, you know, I mean, we see, we actually see it in recruiting our companies can often you know, ed tech is hot these days. It took a long time to get here, but it's, hot, and people on top of being hot, people really do love it. And by the way, one of the reasons it got hot is because you had great founders coming out of other sectors. Having had success at Google or wherever, and starting companies and wanting to start companies in an area they really cared about because they had kids or because you know, something. So we do believe purpose is going to drive higher, better outcomes for a whole host of reasons. And I think it's very much, you know, generational change that's happening. It’s very actively happening.

Stacia Garr:
You mentioned purpose in particular, around attracting people to this space, the ed tech space, but then also in terms of attracting talent, do you have any other perspectives on kind of the role of purpose, particularly within a startup where everybody is so small, everyone's working so hard, the role of purpose in enabling, developing, retaining talent and how important that is in those startups where you think purpose is very clear versus maybe those words a little less clear.

Deborah Quazzo:
I think, you know, startups are really hard, right? They're really stressful situations. And even if it's great, it's stressful. I mean, even if nothing goes wrong, which is almost never the case. It's impossible not to have something go wrong, and in some cases, something go really wrong. And I think that, I mean, I can give you two situations I certainly can't talk about, but in our own portfolios where, you know, at the end of the day they weren't purpose-driven and when things went wrong, they really unwound or they weren't serving enough. So I do think that in a highly stressful environment, and you can look at outside of ed tech and look at, you know, like Airbnb and I have so much respect for Brian Chesky and I don't know him, but I certainly have watched. But that is a company with purpose. He's been able to instill purpose in something you wouldn't naturally think about as having purpose. Education's a little easier to think about as naturally having purpose, but I do think in a world of high stress the fact that you've got purpose and you've got a real feel, you're in an environment with purpose, you feel like you're doing something that's moving the ball forward for mankind, yourself and mankind, it just makes that stress so much more manageable.

Stacia Garr:
And what about the flip side of that? So are there any unique challenges you've seen in startups as they're trying to scale up if purpose is a big deal for them?

Deborah Quazzo:
Companies shouldn't be confused about whether they’re a philanthropy or a company. And I think sometimes companies in education get confused about that. And they ended up not doing, not having enough market mechanisms in the back of their cover—sorry, commercial instincts, probably a better term—not having the adequate commercial discipline and building out the business. And I had a call today with a wonderful, lovely set of really smart human beings. But if you want to build a philanthropy, build a philanthropy, but if you want to build a company, it's got to have, you know, the undergirding of, you know, a real commercial viability. It has to be viable. It has to be sustainable, has to be viable. And I think sometimes people get mixed up. Purpose has to be about viability at the end of the day. And it has to support viability, I guess, is the better term. So yeah, I do. We certainly do see that that problem in the education technology sector.

Dani Johnson:
We want to move to our favorite topic, 2020.

Deborah Quazzo:
When is it over?

Dani Johnson:
It's a good question. COVID happened obviously. A lot of social inequality happened. We're just really interested in how those events have affected your operations and how you guys work.

Deborah Quazzo:
COVID was the tragedy that it is, and it was, and will be, what it's done in terms of learning loss for low-income kids is something we won't know for, you know, probably—it will affect us for years to come unless we can find aggressive ways, accelerated ways to address it. I think actually digital learning will be one of the ways you'll have to be used to address it because you're going to be doing more learning than just in the physical setting. I think that we pivoted, you know, we took our event virtual. We did a whole series of events. We were able to take the conversation. We have great partnership with the Gates Foundation that we've had for a long time and Henry Hipps there. And Henry has been such an inspiration and mentor for me around making sure we're having lots of dialogue around equity and racial equity and everything else. And so we had a series of conversations in the spring. The first one actually moderated by Henry and with four leaders of the black community across the education spectrum and who called themselves the elders, even though one of them is younger than I am, but it was an incredible conversation. In fact, Harvard Business School is going to teach a case study using that panel discussion as the read in, and then have Henry come in and participate in the Zoom class this fall, which we're very proud of.

Deborah Quazzo:
And then we had two more conversation, one with white leaders moderated by Carlos Watson. And then we had one with younger leaders from the education sector who've been extremely involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, which was fantastic conversation, really hard, but really incredible conversation. All of them were hard. So I think that what we've tried to do, what 2020 did to us like, took something that we always cared about and tried to push for. We've tried to make it more real. We tried to make it more central, we tried to make the dialogue, we tried to have it be actionable. So that's been good. I mean, really good is discouraging as the things that have happened this year have been. And yeah those are the changes. Those are the big changes of one just to move virtual. You know, the other is just that our companies for the most part are exploding in a good way. And so the silver lining for us of COVID is that, you know, digital learning has become front and center. It's important. It's what people are talking about all over the world across the Pre-K to Gray spectrum and that has made us pretty busy.

Dani Johnson:
I love your mission. I love the fact that you're, you're trying to make the future equal for everyone, equal access to the future, I think is how you said it. Earlier on, you mentioned the two areas where you work that probably have the most impact on organizational learning and development is probably just stuff you do for organizational learning and development, as well as college. So secondary education. The more, the more I look at this problem, and this is sort of an aside, Debrorah, but the more I look at this problem, I mean, it's broken from Headstart programs. It's broken from preschool on up, and I'm just wondering, you know, how can organizations, do you have any ideas for how organizations can help solve this massive problem? That's going to take 20, at least 20 years to work its way through the system?

Deborah Quazzo:
Well, I think that organization—I am encouraged by, you know, the silos breaking down, right? I think that the fact that many universities who really used to repel the involvement of corporate, of the employers are now embracing employers. So we have so many great online, whether it's Western Governors or Southern New Hampshire or Arizona State or Purdue, we have so many great universities with their online programs that are serving working adults, right? And they're working directly with employers to understand and embed in curriculum what those working adults need in order to have equal access to the future. So, very encouraged by that. I’m also encouraged by, you know, even reaching down into high school where we're beginning to see, and we actually had a lot of this program at the ASU+GSV Summit this year, where we're seeing a lot of companies, I mean, places like Microsoft have been doing this for a long time with their P-TECH high schools model, but really seeing an active engagement by employers in the educational systems. Because, you know, again, if learning isn't relevant, I mean, particularly for low-income kids, if there's, I mean, you know, the abysmal results we've shown, part of is just like we've failed to prove that it's relevant to be sitting in a class or now on Zoom or whatever, to the future. And so we've got to create relevance, and I think the engagement of employers and internships and things that make it tactile are really encouraging and exciting. So I think that the more that employers get involved with higher education, with K-12 education so that we've got these, that these are a continuum as opposed to silos, I think the better. And I think, you know, bringing younger people, high schoolers, et cetera, into the realization of what work looks like and the understanding that learning is lifelong, and you can learn new things and you're going to have to learn new things for the rest of your life.

Deborah Quazzo:
It's just no more taking your degree or your high school diploma or your four-year degree or your two-year degree and filling up your gas tank, and as my partner, Michael Mel will say, you know, driving off into the future, that that's all she wrote, right? I mean that ain't gonna happen anymore. So I think the more that we can help instill that earlier and make learning fun, make it engaging and fun and real. I think that's what businesses can do. I think it's actually been—COVID interesting because employers have been sitting at home with their children. I mean, employers and employees are now very actively part of the K-12 learning process, you know, good or bad. And so I think you're going to have a lot of parents who are also employers and employees coming out of this with new views on what they should be doing. So I'm hopeful for a level of sort of employee and employer activism inspired by what they saw at home.

Stacia Garr:
I think that's an inspiring and optimistic take on what's happening. And I, and I absolutely hope you're right, Deborah.

Chris Pirie:
This is having a terrible effect on, or appears to be having a terrible effect on women in particular. There was a report out from McKinsey, I think last week that said, you know, there's been an astonishing sort of knock back of progress we've made around women in the workforce. It's pretty, that's pretty sad, but any silver linings we can find out of this year is good. Sorry, sorry to butt in!

Deborah Quazzo:
No, no, I agree. Hopefully that will even itself back out. It does prove that women do all the work, which we've always known. But I do think once it gets back to—I do have a husband who actually does half the work, but it depends how you define work—but it will be interesting to see what parents, I mean, we're already seeing, and we just invested in a company called ClassEDU founded by Michael Chasen, who was the co-founder of Blackboard and longtime CEO of Blackboard. He was at home watching his kids do Zoom, realized that Zoom is not a teaching and learning platform. So he's building on the Zoom SDK that the product that is going to, to make Zooming a teaching and learning platform, not just for K-12, but actually for higher education, actually probably has great application in the enterprise. And he will get there and it's been fascinating, the attention that's gotten. Everyone he’s showed it to has been like, the product is just rolling into beta, but everyone who has seen it is wanting to buy it. So I think you are going to see some creativity come out of this. That is good. And some innovation that will be very good for the future.

Chris Pirie:
I can hold my tongue no longer. Sorry, Deborah, who would you talk to if you were doing a series of conversations on this topic of purpose and its relationship to talent and learning? Are there any startups that you, that are doing this really well?

Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think there's a startup called Remind in the K-12 market that we invested in our first fund. The CEO there came in, he was not a founder. He came in really to turn around the business, which he's done really nicely, Brian Gray and Brian's very experienced. He ran Bleacher Report, was a early Yahoo! Executive, really talented technology and tech-talented CEO. His statistics on what they've done, he and his head of talent to turn that company from a company that was not adequately diverse. It's a decent employee for a startup. It's a decent employee size. I mean, his numbers are just jaw-dropping in terms of what he's been able to do to create a workforce at Remind that reflects racial and sexual equity. He's great at it because it is hard to come in and do that, you know, when the car's already running down the highway. Yeah. It's changing all the tires, but he's been great.

Deborah Quazzo:
I think Rachel Carlson at Guild is another great example. Obviously female CEO, female chief, her head of engineering is of woman. I think it helps when you're a female leader. I think you attract great woman probably more easily, but they've had incredible intentionality and building out, and this is a company that has grown extraordinarily quickly for an enterprise SAS business. And that has seen incredible growth over just four and a half years. And they've done that with an incredible commitment to equity and access. I think she would be great to talk to.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Well, I know where getting close on time. So Debra, I have two personal questions for you, one that we didn't share before. So you mentioned several times within GSV, you know, that you have a 50-50 representation on the on the board and a number of other statistics, but yet obviously, as you also mentioned, the percentage of female venture capitalists is very small. So I'd love to hear a little bit about kind of how you think your approach and the perspective you've brought has influenced GSV and also what you might hope to see more broadly in the VC industry.

Deborah Quazzo:
Yeah, I think that what would I like to see more broadly? I think that I do believe in the power of diversity. We actually, as a firm, while we've done incredibly well with racial diversity, we've not—sorry with sexual diversity—we have not done as well with racial diversity. That's something we've got to reverse. But I think so it's really important to be also transparent about what you've done well, what you've not done well. I think that there is, and I've been on enough boards and things that are both diverse and not diverse. And I think the quality, and I think it's just indisputable. The quality of your decision-making is better when you've got, you know, when you've got, you know, voices represented around the table that are different. Hopefully that's kind of what we've brought to the table. I think it is still a struggle to, you know, doing things like—it's still hard to raise money. We've done fine, but you know, we have a very, really nicely high-performing portfolio. It should be, you think it would get easier. It doesn't get easier. It's just human nature. It's just easier to fund or whatever people who look like you. And I think there's been a lot of lip service to this topic, to the topic of, of putting support behind female VCs and also putting support behind female founders. But I don't think the lip service has translated into reality.

Deborah Quazzo:
And I think you find that a lot of women female VCs would agree with that. There are a lot of great initiatives going on. A group called All Raise has gotten out there, you know, very visibly to support equity women and people of color in, in fund management and in venture and in funding ventures. So I think there's really good energy around it. And I don't know how long it's going to take to translate. It's hard to, if you're a limited partner, it's hard to go away from the traditional models that are successful to put, to allocate resources into new, newer, and perhaps untested people just, you know, who are, who happen to be diverse. So that's a challenge. And hopefully that challenge changes or evolves over the next, you know, afraid it's going to take 10 year. But if you look at it, for example, university endowments, you know, they don't disclose it. A number of them have done studies, including my own alma mater and, you know, their female representation and their managers—and those are not just venture, you know, all kinds of fund money managers—is like, you know, low single digits. Wow. I think pressure needs to be placed on organizations like that who are there to serve diverse students. Therefore, that should be reflected all the way through their organization.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Well, my final question, and this is a related, in some ways, I think, is what inspired you to do the work you do? So was there a person, an incident, an observation that inspired you to do this type of work?

Deborah Quazzo:
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. I got involved, my porter in Silicon Valley, Michael Moe had written a bunch of research starting really in the mid 1990s before we worked together really identifying this education sector. So I really, I totally credit him with getting me hooked on why this would be a great area to work in professionally. And then I went from there into also doing my sort of philanthropic energy also goes here, goes into education. And it was a commitment. He had a commitment very early on that it was in this massive chunk of GDP, highly fragmented, incredibly dysfunctional, very little technology in a week management teams, and yet a really critically important problem coming back to the issue of giving all people equal access to the future. I give him, you know, incredible kudos for identifying what ultimately took longer than we would have liked, but clearly identifying why this sector should be a sector and why it should be successful and why that was important to the world that it was successful. So I think Michael inspired me there. I grew up in a family with two incredible parents who were incredibly committed in their own personal work and philanthropy to educational advancement for everybody. And so that helped, that was a lot. And then I just loved it. I mean, you know, is it more fun to go call on a company that makes breakfast cereal or is it more fun to go, you know, call on a company that's really trying to change people's lives meaningfully? And I don't mean to demean what anyone does, but it was just, in the roles that I was in as an investment banker and then ultimately an investor, it was just a lot more fun and inspiring to get out of bed. And yeah, so that's kinda how I ended up there.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Thank you. Well, if people want to learn more about you and your work how can they connect with you?

Deborah Quazzo:
You can go to the ASU+GSV Summit website if you want to watch any of the videos from our amazing summit that occurred that last two weeks, that's incredible and it's free, so you can go on and it's also pulling into—anyway, they're incredible talks. Jon Meacham on John Lewis, on his new book on John Lewis is to die for, for example. And you can get me through, I'm just [email protected] and, you know, I'm on LinkedIn and all that sort of stuff, but I'm happy to connect with anybody. We you know, we care a lot about the workforce space and its importance to the future.

Dani Johnson:
Thank you so much, Debra, thank you for your insights. It's provided a really unique point of view and we really, really appreciate it.

Deborah Quazzo:
Awesome. Thank you, guys. Talk to you later. Bye.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
You're listening to ‘Learning Is the New Working,’ a podcast by the Learning Futures Group about the future of workplace learning and the people helping define it. This episode is part of our season seven, called ‘Is Purpose Working?’ It's a collaboration with Dani Johnson and Stacia Garr of RedThread Research in which we talk about purpose-driven organizations and the impact of purpose on all aspects of talent management. In this episode, Dani Johnson and I interview Celia Berenguer. She's the chief learning officer at Sanofi. Sanofi is a global life sciences company, committed to improving access to healthcare, the healthcare of communities, and to finding new solutions for patients by combining breakthrough science with advanced technology.

Celia Berenguer:
You know, was it perfect and polished and beautiful? Probably not, but it was authentic and it was real and it acknowledged what was going on. And, you know, I think it kind of made it more human. I think that that's created an opportunity for us to say what really matters and what do we really want to focus on.

Chris Pirie:
In March of 2020, Sanofi simultaneously went to work on the critical effort to help develop and manufacture an effective COVID-19 vaccine. While at the same time, flipping 110,000-strong workforce to the new realities of operating in a global pandemic. At the same time, Celia and a team had to weigh the decision as to whether to continue with a planned worldwide launch of the brand-new Sanofi University. This was a journey that involved a new CEO, a deep reflection on Sanofi's purpose and its business results, and perhaps some rethinking of what is the purpose of a corporate university in a time of great crisis. Sometime after recording this interview, Dani and I sat down with Stacia to reflect on the conversation. You'll hear some of discussion before we go into our interview with Celia Berenguer of Sanofi University.

Stacia Garr:
What I loved about it was how thoughtful and really just honest Celia was about the journey that they're on with regarding purpose. That purpose is infused within their organization, that people really believe in it. You know, she talked about the pictures of colleagues in the manufacturing sites during COVID. I think that she was really thoughtful and kind of sharing that, but then saying, Hey, we, you know, we, when I first came here, this was not a big thing. And it's increasingly a big part of how we're thinking about the learning and the resources that we're offering, but we are on this journey. It's here, but we're on this journey and bringing it into our processes and practices.

Chris Pirie:
Definitely on a change journey. And she talked about there's a new CEO there, and she also talks a little bit about how his observation was this strong sense of purpose that he picks up in the culture as he comes in and starts to go around and meet everybody, doesn't seem to be kind of resulting in the right kind of performance outcomes of the business. And so the journey is how do we connect those things more effectively?

Stacia Garr:
We've talked a bit about this dynamic of top down versus bottom up. And so it sounds to me like there was very much a bottom-up focus on purpose and that it was clearly pervaded the culture, but there wasn't kind of the, necessarily the leadership at the top to give it an embodiment of language, a vision, and that structure. And so this new CEO has kind of enabled that and then that's hyper-powering the rest of their efforts to, to reinforce and to bring it to life. If you contrast Sanofi with, you know, one of the other organizations we talked about Medtronic, you can kind of see a little bit of that, that distinction, whereas Metronic also had it baked in from the leadership at the top and that's been consistent. So you kind of feel like in some ways, maybe Sanofi is just a little bit farther behind on the journey, not necessarily less purpose-driven, but farther behind on the journey and getting it integrated. There'll be interesting if we could talk to Celia in a few years to hear where they end up.

Chris Pirie:
The other story that really popped from this conversation was you're bringing to market a brand-new corporate university slap bang in the middle of the first wave of COVID this year. And I thought it was great Celia talked about how it forced them to be more authentic, more real, and more human versus being very polished, which might have been the culture beforehand. And I thought that was really interesting.

Dani Johnson:
I also think it was interesting that she pointed to purpose as a way to make decisions about what they were going to do. So she very clearly says there are these things that we want to do, you know, but there are also these things that we need to do and these things that we really do well. How do we sort of sort through this long laundry list of things to focus on the right things, to get us to our purpose?

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. Once again, clarity in decision-making. She definitely talked about that aspect as well.

Dani Johnson:
I also liked that the way that she talked about it as sort of a unifying force, and those are my words, not hers, but working with the rest of the organization to solve much bigger problems, instead of trying to handle it just with learning or just with, you know, messaging or some of the other things that we've seen in other organizations.

Chris Pirie:
Also a good thread here on skills and talent mobility. Again, a foreshadowing of our next season, Dani, is helping people really connect to developing skills that make sense for them and their own purpose.

Dani Johnson:
I actually think that's a really interesting topic. And as we've started to do some of the research and mobility on skills, how much sort of purpose plays a role? A lot of leaders are terming it as values instead of maybe purpose, but they do it not because it's necessarily, I mean, there is a financial aspect to it, but most of them are doing it to provide a better experience or to ensure that their people are okay if they radically changed directions.

Celia Berenguer:
So my name is Celia Berenguer. I'm the chief learning officer at Sanofi, and today is the 25 of September, 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Celia, thanks so much for joining us on ‘Learning Is the New Working,’ Friday night, your time. We really appreciate that. And as you know, I'm joined by Dani because we have this amazing joint project going on to do a whole series of conversations with people around the topic of purpose-driven organizations and the implications of that for talent management. So welcome.

Celia Berenguer:
Great to be here. Happy to take part.

Chris Pirie:
We are going to start with some quick questions just to sort of sketch out what you do for people. And then Dani is going to pick up there and we're going to dive into a couple of sort of deeper topics. So first question, what part of the world do you live and work in, that might be complicated, and why?

Celia Berenguer:
So that is a complicated question for me. So I live in the UK and I've been here for the past 10 years, but I work in France. Sanofi the company I work for is based in Paris, and I travel between the UK and France on a regular basis, except for obviously under current circumstances, it's been a different pattern. I guess I grew up kind of between cultures and between countries. So it feels quite natural actually to be in a global organization like Sanofi and, you know, sort of spending my time across multiple cultures countries, et cetera. So I love it. I love where I work and I love where I live.

Chris Pirie:
This is an aside I cannot nail down your accent for probably obvious reasons. Where did you develop your accent?

Celia Berenguer:
I was born in France. I grew up primarily in Spain, and I did spend a lot of my time growing up in France and in the US, so my English is heavily influenced. I would say probably I spent a lot of time, at a lot of summers in the northeast of the United States, but I've also spent time kind of in other parts of the US, but I don't know, I guess that means that between my US time and being now 10 years in the UK, I probably have a bit of a bizarre mix.

Chris Pirie:
I can hear all those threads in there, which is great. So could you tell us what your job title is and how would you describe the work that you generally do?

Celia Berenguer:
So I'm the chief learning officer at Sanofi. And I guess what I do is try to help people grow and evolve in the way that's right for them. And for Sanofi, of course, because as chief learning officer, it's about kind of meeting our people's needs to develop and meeting the organization's needs to develop. So it is about learning and development in the organization, but it's with a big spotlight on, you know, how are we identifying what we need for our people and for the organization.

Chris Pirie:
Sanofi is a pretty well-known brand name, and we're all experts on the bio-pharma healthcare industry now, anyway, but could you just describe the business model of Sanofi and the kind of work that it does?

Celia Berenguer:
So we are a global healthcare leader. Of course, we have over 100,000 employees actually representing more than 140 nationalities across the globe. So we're a pretty diverse organization. We have 73 manufacturing sites in 32 countries. So we have, you know, quite a broad presence across the world and across our products. Our products cut across 4 major businesses: our general medicines business, our specialty care, our consumer healthcare, and of course the one that everybody's looking at at the moment, which is vaccines. And then we have obviously a big manufacturing and a big R&D function with 4 major R&D hubs around the world. So we really kind of cut straight through the value chain of the healthcare industry.

Chris Pirie:
And I assume that creates a really diverse set of skillsets of people who work for you. Can you just talk about, a little bit about the talent landscape and perhaps what's going on demographically?

Celia Berenguer:
It's really interesting actually to see how our talent landscape workforce across the world is evolving. And what's interesting about it is that you're definitely seeing different pace of change and types of changed depending on where you're looking around the world. So if I take for instance, or European workforce, you know, you have a lot of people who have been with the company for years and years and years, you know, a demographic that's more sort of traditional possibly leaning towards an older generation. And if I compare that to Asia and in particular, China, you know, there's a much higher turnover rate in somewhere like China. And obviously the demographics are very different as well. So it is quite diverse from one part of the world to another. There's a big factor at the moment, you know, with the changing landscape, how is our talent needing to evolve and what is it that we need to kind of move towards?

Celia Berenguer:
So we talk a lot about like, you know, other organizations, upskilling, reskilling our people. The organization is changing in so many ways for external reasons, you know, external factors and internal factors. So it's kind of like, how is our talent moving at the pace of all of that? I guess what's really clear is that as we think about how our talent evolves and develops, if there ever was a rule book, COVID has definitely fully thrown it out. So it's just accentuated how we, you know, we really need to think differently about what experience people need to be exposed to and how that experience contributes to things like agility and inclusion and perspectives that, you know, we're just not part of the reality. So we're now looking more at things like, you know, how are we getting clear on our skills taxonomy, that types of skills we need in the organization, and using that to be smarter about knowing what we have and how we want to evolve then than relying on kind of traditional jobs and career paths in the organization.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah, definitely. I'm sure Dani is going to want to jump into that topic as well in time. There's a couple of interesting things there. One is having a future orientation. I'm hearing that very strongly as well as this notion of the job to be done rather than job definitions that are fixed. So that's definitely an interesting trend. Can we talk a little bit about this concept of purpose? Does Sanofi have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, do you know what that is?

Celia Berenguer:
Yeah. So for the last couple of years, the sort of purpose of Sanofi has been explicitly shared as empowering life. And you'll see that if you go into our website and kind of engage with a company, that's something that's pretty present. Still, I guess, one thing to say about empowering life is that, you know, I've been in the organization for almost 3 years now. And I guess one of the things that I've definitely picked up from my colleagues around me and other people I've gotten to know and work with and visited around the world is that there's this common thread in the organization about real passion in the people, in the patients that we serve, you know, that we're here to make their lives better, longer, stronger. And that is a truth. You know, that's something that I felt empowering, like I started before I joined the company, but it's certainly something that I felt exists in the organization.

Chris Pirie:
Well, we want to get into how that all helps or hinders you in your kind of day job. Let me hand over to Dani and see if we can talk a little bit about how companies with purpose organizations, with purpose operate differently around people, if at all.

Dani Johnson:
And I would really like to start with just maybe a little bit of a broader question. You talked a lot about how the purpose is sort of felt and you're there to make lives better, longer and stronger. Can you give me some examples of how that manifests itself in sort of the day-to-day of Sanofi?

Celia Berenguer:
That's a good question. For me, one of the places I felt at a lot is actually been with the COVID crisis. So obviously, you know, we have part of our business, which is focused on vaccines, and we have a couple of vaccine candidates in the pipeline, but we're producers of a lot of other medicines for, you know, a lot of other indications. And, you know, it was amazing to me to see the dedication with which people kept, you know, our production levels really high. And we did a great thing inside the company, which was to capture that and share pictures of our colleagues and the manufacturing sites working through the pandemic while many of us were staying at home. So there's been a lot of imagery through this last crisis that I noticed. You know, I joined at a time where there was a real interest in making learning work for the organization.

Celia Berenguer:
So we did a lot of great learning in the company, but it wasn't necessarily really focused. And it wasn't clear, you know, what we were prioritizing and how it was aligned with the strategy. And as I started kind of working on this idea of Sanofi University and you know, I worked with different colleagues around the business and the people involved to kind of come up with a model and an approach. It was so interesting to me that whenever I spoke to people and we talked about, you know, what do we want learning to do for the organization? And, you know, just to get a sense of, you know, where the energy was and interests and the need, often people talked about, you know, we're here to serve the patients, you know, to get our products out there and helping others. So that, to me, Dani was what I felt personally in my day to day that it was something that, you know, when we asked questions, it consistently came up, you know, and not a lot of people connect learning with, you know, how we're making, we’re helping people get better and stronger and, you know, and live longer. So that for me was a very tangible example.

Dani Johnson:
I think that's really interesting. This is a broader talent discussion, but I'd love to dive that just a little bit. Do you think this mission or this purpose helps you prioritize and focus the programs that you go after?

Celia Berenguer:
So I would say that while empowering life and the sense of not losing sight of the patient is something that you feel in the organization. I don't know that it's been consistently used as a point of alignment and focus and prioritization. So let me explain what I mean by that From a performance perspective, Sanofi over the last few years has been, you know, struggling a bit to sort of find its place, I guess, is the best way to describe it and great products, great people. And we had our CEO arrived about a year ago, actually last September and, you know, came in with great enthusiasm and kind of spent the first hundred days going around the business and really getting to know, you know, getting to know us and getting to know the business and getting to know our customers and the environment.

Celia Berenguer:
I mean, and he's a very seasoned sort of healthcare industry professional. So obviously he knew the space, but it was fascinating because he kind of came in and said, look, I, you know, this is an incredible, he talks about hidden gems in the organization. He talks about the fact that, you know, he just sees such incredible opportunities and potential in the company and some real expertise and just an ability to do amazing things. And that doesn't always translate in our performance. And so I guess what I would say, Dani, is that there was a purpose there that was clearly alive. Were we using it in a way to really drive our strategy and our business? I'm not so sure. And I think with Paul Hudson, our CEO, has done since he's joined, has really picked up on that and said, we really need to drive our culture and our strategy and the direction that we're maximizing what we have in this company.

Celia Berenguer:
And so he's actually kicked that off at the beginning of this year to really translate that into where we focus and how are we prioritizing our business going forward. And what's the underpinning culture that we want to have to really support it. And we've become a lot more explicit about that in the last month. So it's still quite new in the organization and it's, you know, and it's being felt because it's resulted in some restructure and also in some sort of reshifting of mindsets, but it's created a lot of energy. And I think that's at least for the moment, that's something that has been tangible in the company. And now I would say, yes, we have a lot more. Like if I look at, for instance, my agenda around learning and development and, you know, how we're supporting our people in our talent in the organization, I can say I'm much clearer about, you know, how are we supporting those behaviors, where are the growth businesses, and how we're making sure that we're supporting that consistently, but also doing it in a smart way, right? It's not just, you know, kind of going after the little things, but really thinking holistically about how we want to support the business. So I guess that's the long answer to your question. And the short one is I don't think we were doing such a great job of prioritizing and achieving focus through our purpose, but I think now we're starting to.

Dani Johnson:
I love that. Yeah. It sounds like you've sort of now started to align some of those internal practices to make sure that the overall purpose of the organization is met. I'm really interested also in if you had a couple of conversations with other leaders and they talk about purpose of the individual, as well as purpose of the organization, I'd love to understand a little bit about what you all are doing to help individuals connect to that larger purpose or to align their purpose with that larger purpose.

Celia Berenguer:
Yeah, that's a really, really good question. And one part of my answer is going to be, we are focusing very strongly at the moment on helping people understand and sort of bring to life for them individually, where the organization is headed and the behaviors that underpin that. We've tied it to individual purpose because we talk about the fact that culture and thinking and feelings and beliefs that people have driving those behaviors and actions that then give you the results that you're trying to achieve as a company. So when we speak to leaders, we kind of make that distinction. And while the visible part tends to be that action or behavioral side of things, we tie it to values and individual values as much as organizational values.

Chris Pirie:
This sounds a lot like a focus on the culture of the organization and perhaps driving a shift in the culture of the organization. Would you say that's part of your kind of role as chief learning officer?

Celia Berenguer:
So it's definitely part of my role because I think everybody plays a role in shifting culture in the organization. My role is to help ensure that we can get any of the support mechanisms, development tools, et cetera, out there that can really kind of bring it to life for people. That's what matters. So I have some incredibly talented people in my team who spend a lot of time thinking about the different ways in which we want to engage with people. And I tend to talk about people more than leaders, because I think all people are leaders in organizations. So I really, you know, I think it's something that really needs to touch everybody. I think lots of people play a role. And of course at the end of the day, you only shift culture if everybody's part of it.

Chris Pirie:
All oars in the water, as we said at Microsoft.

Dani Johnson:
I think it's really interesting that you talk of culture is something that is a result of the actions that are existing in the organization, rather than the thing that you control. I think a lot of organizations think about culture as it's defined. It's on the wall, we all know what it is, therefore it's going to happen. But I love the way Sanofi is thinking about it as we need to change the internal people's systems and help people get to those behaviors that actually will change the culture here. Obviously COVID has been a huge disruption over the entire world, and I'm interested as organizations are making these changes sometimes they have to make some pretty difficult tradeoffs. Wondering if your purpose alignment and your core talent functions have had to make any tradeoffs or have had any challenges with that.

Celia Berenguer:
I guess it will probably depend who you speak to in Sanofi about tradeoffs. I would say rather than tradeoffs, I would talk about priorities and focus because I think, and maybe it's my glass-half-full approach to life where, you know, there are definitely constraints. Yeah, there's definitely constraints and not least of which, by the way, is the fact that we are in the middle of realigning our organization to be more focused from a business perspective. So that's obviously had implications on our structure. We're trying to shift culture as a company. And at the same time, you know, we have the same problem everybody else has, which is we're trying to contain costs. And especially this year, you know, where it's an exceptional year. So there's constraints we have to work with. And I think that has, Dani, forced us to make decisions about things we want to do versus things we need to do, and that we want to do really well, rather than having a massive laundry list of things that we want to kind of get out there.

Celia Berenguer:
And I'll tell you one thing that's been really interesting. Historically, we're an organization that likes to do things really well, really polished. Everything is beautiful and shiny and, you know, and it looks fantastic, and then COVID hits and suddenly we're scrambling to get stuff out there. And, you know, we launched Sanofi University, our corporate university, and literally, in a week's time had to shift from an original plan to a, right, everybody's going to be dialing in from their part of the world at home. So what are we going to do to kind of engage people? And, you know, was it perfect and polished and beautiful? Probably not, but it was authentic and it was real and it acknowledged what was going on. And, you know, I think it kind of made it more human. And so I think that that's created an opportunity for us to say what really matters and what do we really want to kind of then focus on? And so when people tell me, you know, we have to reduce our budget in L&D, I say, okay, well, how can we be smarter about where our L&D budgets even sit and who's making decisions about them and how are we making choices for Sanofi rather than leaving things to happen at very sort of, you know, local levels. And, you know, some people would call that a tradeoff. I call it an opportunity to look at the problem differently and see how we can make it work for us.

Dani Johnson:
The other thing that I really like about that statement, Celia, is you're working with the rest of the organization to solve a much bigger problem than the one that you have right in front of you on your plate. And I think as the pandemic has washed over the world, we're seeing more and more of that. The statement you made about some things being sloppier than you would like them, or maybe not as polished, definitely, definitely resonates with us.

Dani Johnson:
We’d love to go into maybe a few more questions about COVID because we think it's very brave that you launched a corporate university during COVID. Tell us what that was like.

Celia Berenguer:
So, first of all, we're sort of in the middle of transitioning towards a holistic corporate university. So there's a couple of principles that we hold for Sanofi University. The first is to help you build the skills that you need for today and for tomorrow. So it's very much focused on skills and how you use the corporate university to kind of identify what's going to help you in your career in your life, you know, where your interests are. The second principle is learn where and when you want. So obviously this is all about it being multi-channel and digital and mobile and all of that good stuff. And the third one is for Sanofi by Sanofi. So it's learning that reflects what the company is liking and needing, but it also reflects our own voices. So in some respects, we've been working on those three principles since before COVID, but it almost kind of made them resonate even more because with COVID, everybody's realized the world is changing at an unprecedented pace, but now it was like a flip overnight.

Celia Berenguer:
So it really kind of put a spotlight on how do I think about my skills and, you know, digital skills being kind of one of the things that really started bubbling up in the sense that—or virtual skills, right?—in the sense of how do I suddenly work in a 100% virtual team or the reality of that change. The learn everywhere, you know, when and where you want just became a reality, right? And we have pictures of people waiting in the line to get into a supermarket in Indonesia, you know, listening to podcasts or doing an e-learning on their mobile. So it just totally became a reality. And then, for Sanofi by Sanofi, really, it was about making it real for us. And, you know, it's funny because one of the trends we've seen in L&D is, you know, there used to be a lot of custom-built learning that was being done.

Celia Berenguer:
And we think about the early days, and then we went from there to curation. So we bought a lot of off-the-shelf stuff and tried to weave it together. And now it's more about democratizing learning and letting kind of learning come from anywhere and everywhere. So, I mean, we're definitely on that journey and still figuring out how that's all going to fit for us, but at least it's now kind of a tangible thing that we want to aspire to and bring different voices in. And so all of that, I think made it really relevant to launch a corporate university in the middle of the COVID pandemic. And then another magical sort of alignment of the planets happened, which is, you know, when I did a little heads up to our executive committee saying, Hey, just a reminder, next week, we're going to launch Sanofi University’s series of webcasts for all of our people around the world, you know, really excited, and it'll be great to get the offer out there. And, Paul Hudson, our CEO sends a little note saying, Hey, how can we really do something exciting for our people learning? And so we kind of had a chat and, you know, I said, look, if we really want to stretch the idea of investing in yourself and investing in learning, especially if you're stuck at home and maybe you have more time on your hands for some people that wasn't the case, invest in learning.

Celia Berenguer:
And so we launched this challenge to the entire organization, which is, this was in March. We said, Hey, do we think that by June accumulatively, we can achieve a million hours of learning between, you know, all of our people around the world. And we got to, you know, I think the last number I heard when we were looking at the numbers in June was 860,000 hours, which wasn't the 1 million, but I gotta say, I was like floored by the level of dedication and investment that we saw from our people. And we had a Yammer community and people were posting their certificates and taking pictures of what they'd done and talking about what they learned. And it was just phenomenal and exciting. And so I think, Dani, what seemed like a really scary thing when it was like, do we really want to lunch Sanofi University, actually turned out to be the perfect timing and we got incredible visibility and support around it.

Chris Pirie:
That's a great story. Amazing. Congratulations on that. And that's good. And I think that, I think your timing turned out to be really impeccable. I mean, we've seen engagement levels around learning, as you pointed out, people realized that the world is changing. And one way to prepare yourself for that is to, is to smarten up. And I think we're seeing all kinds of data on all kinds of learning platforms that really illustrate a similar trend. So I think your timing was just great. I'm interested in a couple of things that you said that one, I like this ‘for Sanofi by Sanofi’ idea. And I want to just kind of probe on that a little bit. To me, that means culture of learning people, learning from each other, collaborative social forms of learning. How do you think about the future developing? And let's just pick ‘for Sanofi by Sanofi,’ for example, how do you see that playing out? What experiments do you want to run around that principle?

Celia Berenguer:
So that's a great question and something that actually I'm very passionate about. So there's a couple of things for me in the ‘for Sanofi by Sanofi’ that are really critical. And the first is that, as you said, there's a today and there's a tomorrow around that principle. The today, for me, is explaining to people that things like what learning is available is going to become more and more reflective of what people are actually using. So I realized that it's like a really basic concept, but you know, a lot of organizations aren't sort of tuning their learning offer to where the interest and the time is being spent. And I want people to be able to engage with what's available to them because they know that it's something that's reflective of what the organization is using. And I also want it to be filled with voices from within the organization.

Celia Berenguer:
We hold lots of expertise inside Sanofi. So, you know, why would we need to go other places to learn from, you know, the people, the great people that we have inside Sanofi? So what that's translated into is we're now being a lot more deliberate at looking at where people are spending their time and what are the areas, what does that start telling us about the areas and interests that people have? And that's, you know, one lens that we're applying. We're also making it a lot easier for leaders to create podcasts or create videos that they want to share with a broader organization. So there's sort of support tools and little how-to's to help people do that so that we can really start mixing in different voices. But as you said, Chris, for me, the real, the real opportunity is that sort of full democratization of learning and that learning is happening between people within communities and that we're creating ways for people to find each other and learn from each other and share with each other that start aligning to kind of the different needs that start bubbling up in the organization.

Celia Berenguer:
And also, you know, that we can make really explicit how it connects to things like our strategy and our culture. So we're not there yet. We're actually starting to take an even deeper look at our sort of learner-centric approach in learning and how do we want to move into different technologies to help inform that, but it's still early days. And the message at the moment is really about making it tangible and real for Sanofi. But I do want to move in the direction of kind of social learning and connections and community learning, because that's what makes a learning organization really agile.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. It's really interesting. I think about the, just like, I mean, you're a science company, right? And science is about community solving problems together and learning together. And I'm sure there's a lot that you could pull on from the sort of scientific aspect of what your company does that might provide some models for you. Very, very interesting.

Chris Pirie:
I was going to ask a little bit about how you connect generally with the rest of the talent functions in Sanofi. Are you part of a talent system, or do you think of learning as a discreet thing? What's your point of view on that?

Celia Berenguer:
I definitely think we're part of a system, whether that's happening explicitly or not. You know, there's a connection because the moment you're talking about a talent, you're talking about talent development and the moment you're talking about talent development, you know, you're talking about learning. So it's all connected. At the moment, the way the system works in Sanofi is we have our talent management system and definition. So our high-potential definition and all that good stuff owned by our talent team. And that intersects with us in the way that we're two things probably very concretely. The first is we're getting data from our talent teams about sort of profiles, needs, et cetera, to help inform, you know, how we're fine tuning, what are the different development solutions that we're trying to achieve the second way is specifically how we're making explicit the idea that you own your own careers.

Celia Berenguer:
So as part of our talent narrative, we really want people to kind of step in to how they want to develop as talent in the organization and really kind of making lots of things available to people and seeing what's helping them because the underlying principle there, and we've created a lot of virtual and sort of self-driven learning solutions, which can, you know, can take lots of different forms like e-learning, but sometimes it can be synchronous sessions with different members of the community. But the thinking there that, you know, different people might have very different needs and it's actually better to have a lot available and have people start choosing and seeing where they gravitate rather than being prescriptive of, ‘Oh, you know, you're in this part of the nine box. And so we're going to put you on this program.’ So those are the ways that we're explicitly connected to the talent system today. And obviously the idea is that we'll continue to evolve that particularly as our skills definition starts becoming more explicit. We're in the process of trying to create a more aligned skills taxonomy across the organization. So, you know, how do we use that to inform us what we have, what talent we have, where and how it can move? You know, where are the opportunities?

Chris Pirie:
Do you see a future with the talent kind of flows a little bit more easily around the organization and L&D playing a role in that?

Celia Berenguer:
Yes, I guess there's two. I'm hesitating because one of the things that's really interesting about what I'm starting to see when I look at skills taxonomies that are bubbling up in Sanofi is that we're starting to look for really deep expertise in certain areas. And, you know, like data analytics is one of those areas, but data analytics applies in a lot of parts of the business. So today, it doesn't feel like the flow is there. And I'm really interested in seeing how we can help movement happen across parts of the business that have historically not been, you know, we've not seen that type of movement happen before. I think the pace of how things are changing is so fast that I do believe it will become more possible to do that. And L&D roles in that? I mean, to be honest, for me, it's two things. I think L&D plays a critical role because I think we need to make it easy for people to choose, to develop skills in skills that may not naturally sit in their current role.

Celia Berenguer:
So there's something about just making that possible that I think is a critical role for L&D because we won't know, we won't have everybody on our radar and we won't know when people have the desire and capability to kind of really build another area of knowledge or, you know, reskill in a particular way. And at the same time, I think given how the organization is shifting, I think, L&D plays a really important role in saying we have a massive gap in these types of skills. What do we need to do to close that gap so that we don't have to rely a hundred percent on buying versus building talent in the organization?

Dani Johnson:
This is my soapbox right now, Celia. I'm talking a lot about skills and mobility and sort of the connection between them. And I think it's great that you made that connection between making sure that people have access to build the skills that they want, and not just the skills in their current ladder and that mobility, it seems like. I love that you're there, you're starting to understand the skills that you have in the organization so that you can also understand the holes that you have, which gives a better idea of, you know, where people can move. And I love how this is a discussion about purpose, but we're talking about skills mobility, because you've connected sort of the individual purpose of the individual—that sounded weird—but the purpose of the individual to the purpose of the organization. And I think that's where we're going to see organizations go, but also, where we are going to see success come is when we can overlap the purpose of the individual with the purpose of the organization.

Celia Berenguer:
And I think this is where I'm quite curious about how we can take L&D one step further. And, you know, there's a lot of tech out there, you know, using artificial intelligence and lots of mechanisms to read people and read organizations and try to make, you know, connect dots. Because my belief is that I, as an individual, may not be thinking all the time about my skills. I mean, that's initially the thing I do, I think about that a lot, but I guess it's my role, but you know, most people don't. And so obviously we talk a lot about now things like learning and the flow of work or learning in the flow of life, or, you know, how the intersection between what I'm explicitly doing to learn and develop versus what I'm doing in my sort of day-to-day activities is blurring.

Celia Berenguer:
I feel like people need help to connect those dots and it comes from my value, like the value set that I hold, right? Because depending on what I want in life and what I think in life is going to drive choices that I make around development. And I think that if we can use tech to help make that sort of real and tangible and possible for people, it will be awesome. And right now, the best opportunities are probably using things like learner experience platforms that are making some of those connections between skills and individuals and opportunities. But I hope it will continue to evolve even more than that.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah, I really do too. We've seen some really interesting technologies that are connecting data from everywhere to give the individual and the organization much more information about the skills that they have. And I think you're right. I think data is empowering. So when we push it down to individuals, they're the ones that are one, most motivated to do something and two, most empowered to do something about it. And so I'm really excited to see where that goes.

Chris Pirie:
I, on the other hand, worry about taxonomies because I think they can be huge time sinks. And I think there's a lot of complexity around the appropriate level of granularity. I do think AI can pick up on trends, you know, just looking across unstructured data and activity to pick up on trends that are useful, but I think it's still immature.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah. I think there's a big discussion now out there in the data space and in the learning space about ontologies versus taxonomies, and Chris, I've got lots of papers to send if you’re interested in learning about sort of theory behind that.

Celia Berenguer:
I'm interested in that too. Because we're in the process of building this huge creative skills library and I'm like, and you know, I get it because we need to kind of have alignment, but I'm with you, Chris. It's kind of like, you know, you've done all this work and the moment you hit send, it's already outdated. And then you hear, ‘Oh, now we can't touch it for the next whatever years,’ and you’re like, ‘Really? because, you know, next week we're going to need different skills.’

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. That's exactly the pace of change.

Chris Pirie:
We always ask people on the podcast about their personal sense of purpose, even before we started to talk about the purpose economy and purpose as a factor in organizations. And I'm just curious, Celia, as to why you do the work that you do. Was there somebody or something or some experience that got you on this track or are you desperate to get out of it?

Celia Berenguer:
No, I love what I do. There wasn't anybody in particular, Though I think because I grew up being put in really different environments and different countries and having to kind of learn my way around those different environments in different countries, I think it just automatically made me fascinated with the ability we have to learn and grow and have a richness as individuals from that development. And I've worked in several organizations, global organizations, and different industries. I have had the luck to be a consultant with companies, you know and worked for companies across the world. I've worked in business schools. So I've seen like lots of different environments and, you know, one of the things I've seen is really fantastic leadership and the impact it has and not so fantastic leadership. And I believe that is something anybody can learn, you know, in that specific to leadership, because I feel like, you know, there's a massive opportunity there, but I guess that's still with me. And, you know, it's to the extent that I actually spend part of my personal time as a trustee of a nonprofit in the UK called Ambition Institute, which is focused on developing skills of all sorts, including leadership in our teachers, because you know, great teachers with great leadership skills create great opportunities for the kids. So I'm pretty passionate about it.

Chris Pirie:
That’s crystal clear. Hey, thank you so much for your time today and your insights. Great job on launching the university in the pandemic. That's a story, and get back to work on that vaccine, if you can, for us, that would be awesome.

Celia Berenguer:
Absolutely. Thanks so much. It's really great speaking to both of you. Thanks for inviting me.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie :
You're listening to ‘Learning Is the New Working,’ a podcast by the Learning Futures Group about the future of workplace learning and the people helping define it. This episode is another of our collaborations with RedThread Research in a season that we call ‘Is Purpose Working?’

Clint Kofford:
Johnson & Johnson has long been a purpose-based organization, and the story of our founders and what they were trying to achieve and to accomplish was certainly much more about purpose and broad impact in the world than it ever was about profits.

Chris Pirie :
That was Clint Kofford. He's the global head of the Performance Institute at Johnson & Johnson. Johnson & Johnson is the largest, most broadly based healthcare company in the world and one of only a handful of companies that's been successful for over a century of operations. Their story illustrates that being purpose driven is by no means a new or recent phenomenon. We're starting this episode with the debrief conversation by way of an executive summary for you. I sat down with Stacia and Dani to talk about the conversation we had with Clint. And I started by asking Statia to give us some context regarding Johnson & Johnson and its significance to a conversation about purpose and talent.

Stacia Garr :
J&J is in many ways, one of the best-known organizations when it comes to purpose. They have their credo, which started in 1943, which was developed in 1943. And it was developed by Robert Wood Johnson the Second, and really came from this place of kind of human dignity. He actually said when he first developed it, that he thought that the whole matter of dignity and employment boils down to every worker from the chairman of the board to the office boy or sweeper is a human being and that they are endowed with this ego. And that in some ways modern business had reduced the size of that ego, but that it was actually critical for an organization to enable that ego. Then that sense of I am a person who matters. And so when he developed this credo, he was thinking about that concept starting first with the patients, doctors, the nurses, the mothers and fathers, but then going through all the different stakeholders and really fundamentally coming back to the sense of dignity and that their purpose as an organization was to connect back to that sense of dignity.

Stacia Garr:
I think it's also interesting, you know, he even anticipates the idea that some people might say, well, you know, this isn't what a business is about. And the credo was actually developed before J&J went public. And so it was a very clear statement to potential shareholders that this is where we stand. This is, these are our values. And then he actually put into the end of the credo, he said, if we put our customers first and followed through on our other responsibilities, I assure you the stockholders will be well-served. I think it's a beautiful way to kind of pull it all together. And again, to recognize that dignity of people.

Chris Pirie:
We think of this purpose as being a new concept because of all the recent news around the Business Roundtable. But in fact, organizations have operated from this point of perspective for many years. And if anything, the ’70s and Milton Friedman focus on shareholder primacy is kind of a blip that I find that very interesting and comforting maybe.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think it is interesting and comforting. That said, I think that there has long been a focus on an efficiency mindset of capitalism. So if you go back to a book that we started the series talking about, Chris, ‘The Enlightened Capitalist,’ James O'Toole makes the point that, you know, these purpose-driven organizations have often been anomalies, whether you're talking about Robert Owen or the founders of Unilever. So it hasn't, the idea isn't new, but the idea that it should be widespread or widely adopted is not necessarily firmly established, shall we say, even, you know, starting with the 1700s. But I do think that this ultra focus on the shareholder is a blip because I think that the general mindset in many instances, certainly not all is particularly when you look at the industrialists with the 1920s, but in many instances, it isn't over-focused. And I think maybe we're correcting back.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. And also, this idea that they're in opposition, that you can, you know, you can't have both together and that's clearly being reexamined. A couple of things from our conversation with Clint that was really interesting to me. One was this Human Performance Institute that he runs and how the physical, emotional, and mental energies come together. And he talked about spiritual energy as really quite amazing.

Stacia Garr:
When he said spiritual, he immediately then said, ‘which for me means purpose.’ He came immediately connected spiritual to purpose. And the point that he made, I think there was that you can have these other capabilities, you know, the mental, the physical, et cetera, but until you align them and have that already, you don't achieve that next level of performance with those most successful people were doing. And that was in some ways, a beautiful way of explaining much of what we've been talking about, which is that enablement and that alignment of purpose is that thing that enables that higher level. We've been talking about organizational performance and he was talking about individual, but really that higher level of performance.

Chris Pirie:
He also said, this is another theme that I'm getting from all of these conversations to keep coming back to this is, that is the credo comes in super handy when we have to make decisions. Purpose brings clarity.

Dani Johnson:
I thought one of the interesting things that he's doing with that Institute is he's not just focusing on the mental. So most organizations think of sort of purpose as a mental exercise, but he brought in this idea of paying attention to diet and paying attention to weight and equipping the people in the organization with tools to take care of those things as well. So they're not just worried about the mental aspect of their folks or the people that they serve. They're worried about the entire person.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. Shipping out these advanced tools to people's homes in the COVID in order to keep that focus on your physical wellbeing as well as your mental wellbeing.

Stacia Garr:
I think this was one of the clearest examples we saw from somebody of a connection between individual purpose and what the organization was enabling. So that career planner that he mentioned, and then tying all of that back to the credo. So we say in the credo that we need to have a sense of security and purpose in our jobs. And so we're having this conversation with people about their purpose and then connecting that to their career aspirations. I just found that so remarkable in almost like the Holy Grail of what we've been looking for in these conversations of how do you take a concept and make it rigorous and something individuals can actually connect to.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. And a very clear role for L&D in this whole conversation and this argument, that real clear tactic. The one other thing I thought was interesting in the conversation was a little bit countertrend to what I see, and that is they're taking this performance Institute and they're focusing it inwards in and quite a lot of companies right now are taking their learning engines and using them to engage with external stakeholders, customers, and partners. They're obviously very, very focused on turning this to get their own performance and where it needs to be. I thought was kind of interesting too.

Dani Johnson:
What do you make of that, Chris?

Chris Pirie:
I was surprised. I think he says in the conversation that they're going to offer it to some strategic partners. And like I say, it's a little bit countertrend, and it'd be interesting to see how that plays out.

Dani Johnson:
I think it's countertrend, but I wonder if that's where we're going. I wonder if the pendulum is swinging back and they're just a little bit ahead of the curve.

Chris Pirie:
Could be. He does also talk about access to talent and more, less traditional ways to access talent at one point in our conversation, which I thought was quite interesting that he's thinking about that too, when he's thinking about the future.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah. I've actually talked to a couple of people from J&J since then, and they mentioned the same thing. They're trying to figure out how to not just take care of the talent that has a W2, but also the talent that they borrow from external sources.

Chris Pirie:
Well, this is all about our next season, isn't it? And skills and skill models, skill access models.

Stacia Garr:
May I ask maybe a counterpoint? Because you both were saying that it's not on trend, but maybe a different interpretation. It says very on trend in that Dani, you and I have been talking about the integration of learning performance engagement, et cetera. And maybe because they combined their talent function with this Human Performance Institute. And as you said, that Institute is looking at the whole person. Maybe it's actually just a little bit more forward-thinking in that holistic view of what's happening with employees and bringing it all together in a meaningful way that also includes, you know, leadership and wellbeing. So maybe in that way, it's very, very on-trend. Yeah.

Chris Pirie:
I completely buy that. And I just think that generally this notion of having a learning function that is customer or partner focused and then turning it to point almost exclusively internal that's what's a little bit different from other models that I'm seeing.

Stacia Garr:
But it's kind of an interesting leverage question, isn't it? Because if you think about external, there's a limit potentially on the leverage that they're getting from those resources being externally focused and that being the amount of revenue that they're bringing in through that team and effectively, they're saying if we turn that inside the revenue that we're going to be able to generate by making our own people more effective is much greater than we were with this as an externally facing unit that have to run its own P&L. So maybe it's just a really big bet on them.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. Very, very, very good point. And I think also the trend towards engaging customers and partners is not necessarily driven as a revenue generating activity, which this was, right? So that might be something that's a little bit different.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. I bet you it's not at all. I think that's entirely a kind of a relationship thing and maybe an extension of purpose, you know. When you think about back to their credo, you know, all these different groups, these strategic partners are very clearly a part of their community. When you talk about we're responsible to the communities in which we live and work and to the world community as well.

Chris Pirie:
Great conversation, a very interesting guy and clearly purpose-driven organization. Exemplary.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, I think we were, we were lucky to get kind of, one of—we started this season talking about who we'd most like to talk to. And I think any of these kind of standard bearer organizations, a purpose was at the top of our list or it should have been. And so I feel lucky that we were able to have the conversation.

Clint Kofford:
So my name is Clint Kofford. I am the global head of the Human Performance Institute at Johnson & Johnson. And today is September 24.

Chris Pirie:
We all start with a question about what part of the world you live in, Clint, and why do you live and work there?

Clint Kofford:
So I live in north central New Jersey, about 60 minutes from New York City. And I live here, you know, predominantly because of my job. So I work for Johnson & Johnson. That's located in New Brunswick, New Jersey is where our headquarters are.

Chris Pirie:
How would you describe the kind of work that you do?

Clint Kofford:
I have the responsibility and privilege really of leading all of our enterprise development efforts. And so what that primarily focuses on is manager and leadership development at all of our levels. So everything from our individual contributors that would come in and need learning to grow and develop in their careers all the way up to our most senior executives. And again, would be focused in the areas like growth programs or capabilities and skills that would help people grow, management capability, leadership development but also enterprise skills like digital and data science where we're leaning in. And we don't own those exclusively, but partner with a number of our kind of stakeholders across the enterprise to bring to life these capabilities for Johnson & Johnson.

Chris Pirie:
Now, there can't be many people on the planet who are not familiar with the brand Johnson & Johnson, but can you just kind of in case someone's been under a rock, could you describe the business model and then how the Human Performance Institute sort of fits into that?

Clint Kofford:
Johnson & Johnson is the largest and most diversified healthcare company in the world. And we have three big sectors that we operate in and that's the pharmaceutical sector, the medical device sector, and consumer health caresector.

Chris Pirie:
And the Institute's role in all that?

Clint Kofford:
Yeah, so the Human Performance Institute was originally founded over just over 30 years ago by two individuals, Dr. Jack Groppel and Dr. Jim Loehr. And at the time they were at the forefront of their fields and sports physiology and sports psychology, and they were studying tennis athletes. And what they realized was what separated the number one tennis athletes from the rest was, you know, a combination of practices that help them really hone their, how they use their physical, mental, and emotional energy to bring about their spiritual energy, which is their purpose. So these kind of guiding principles of energy management of resilience of character have really launched into opportunities to develop corporations in what they called for many years, the corporate athlete, and the Human Performance Institute was a standalone entity. It was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2008. And for the first 12 years, in Johnson & Johnson, was a commercial business for us.

Clint Kofford:
It operated as part of our healthcare sector as part of our health and wellness set of businesses and has done a tremendous job for us in building brand equity with other companies, helping to teach and broaden the skillsets of energy management and resilience across many, many companies. So we have clients that span all industries and nonprofits and for-profit companies. But we made the decision, the strategic decision, early this year to make the Human Performance Institute really focus much more internally than ever before. And while obviously we had been taking advantage of its programs, we merged the legacy Human Performance Institute with our talent development function, so that it became truly our new brand for learning and development at Johnson & Johnson. And now provides us with this holistic view of what leadership really is and what leaders need to do and how to develop not only the capabilities, but the capacity and the character to lead. And so that's what we're really focused on now is focusing primarily on our employees internally with all the amazing things that the Institute has done. And then our strategic customers will continue to be served as we move forward. And we're ending our commercial operations, our general commercial operations, at the end of 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Oh, that's really interesting. So, so you are flipping from having an external focus to being a hundred percent focused on J&J employees.

Clint Kofford:
Correct. Well, I mean, not a hundred percent. I mean, we, again, we'll still service our strategic customers. So these would be, you know, in the pharmaceutical space, these would be some of the insurance groups, medical device space. This is a hospital systems in the consumer space, this is, you know, the CVSs and Walmarts and Walgreens of the world and so on. So there's still some external focus for sure, but I mean, it's kind of the equivalent of, you know, the Disney Institute flipping from being focused externally to coming inside and really trying to drive massive culture change within the business.

Dani Johnson:
Just out of curiosity, Clint. This is Dani. How, why was that decision made? What drove that decision?

Clint Kofford:
Well, I think there's a desire for us to better, well, one—I think in this war, the future, with the future of work and all the trends that drive around, you know, are kind of showing, you know, the importance of purpose and the importance of leadership development. We realized we had an amazing asset on our hands that was not doing as much good internally as it was externally. And at the same time we had an opportunity to some of our internal programs and the positioning of our offerings. And so being able to combine these gives us a platform that allows us to do, you know, a lot more good when we've got now a facility based in Orlando. So in some ways, you know, it's to use the GE analogy, right? This is, it's kind of a smaller version of Crotonville, but it's all geared around, you know, the holistic person.

Clint Kofford:
So it's not just facility with a bunch of classrooms. I mean, this facility is designed to be able to allow us to run our performance program, which requires, you know, that people participate in, you know, exercises and, you know, we help guide them through different ways and means that they can increase their physical energy. We talk and teach a lot about how to eat right and how that drives energy and the quality of energy. And also, you know, some of the health assessments that we're able to run through that facility. So there's a lot of, you know, benefits that we're going to get internally by having the intellectual property, the facilities, the brand, the process excellence of that the Human Performance Institute brings.

Chris Pirie:
Can you talk a little bit about the population in J&J? How many people work there, kind of job roles and what are the demographic trends that you have?

Clint Kofford:
Yeah, so we have about 135,000 employees across the world. Roughly half would be in our supply chain organization. We're in all the major countries and all regions. So, I mean, we are truly a, I would call it a global organization, not just a multinational organization. And in terms of demographics, and then I think the reality is that we're, I feel like we're very similar to other global multinational companies in the sense that we are moving, and I've seen evolution from, you know, this focus on the full-time employee to growing numbers of, you know, contractors. And I see in the future, you know, the move towards, you know, gig workers and kind of more flexibility as our talent wants and expects different opportunities and flexibility from Johnson & Johnson. And certainly the business wants to take advantage of that.

Clint Kofford:
So, you know, I see us moving from the talent management space or the traditional talent management space into something more like talent access, right? And how do we always make sure that we're finding that the best and the brightest for the work that's at hand? And that may come directly from Johnson & Johnson, and it may come from partnerships and relationships that are adjacent to Johnson & Johnson.

Chris Pirie:
Oh, that's really interesting. And you alluded to this a number of times already. It's pretty clear that the company operates with a clear sense of purpose and mission. Can you just lay that out for us?

Clint Kofford:
Yes. So Johnson & Johnson has long been a purpose-based organization. And I would venture to say, we're probably the original purpose-based organization. I don't have data or facts to kind of back that up, but the story of our founders and what they were trying to achieve and to accomplish was certainly much more about purpose and broad impact in the world than it ever was about profits.

Dani Johnson:
We’ve been talking to quite a few people who've done some research on purpose over the summer, and especially how COVID has affected that purpose. We found that purpose is a little bit flexible in some organizations when it comes to large, large disasters. Your credo is really interesting to me. It's always been really interesting to me, but just hearing you talk about it where you're basically saying, we must do this, we must do this. We must do this. Doctors, employees.

Clint Kofford:
Yeah. So it's our doctors, nurses, patients, and our employees that are the communities, and then our shareholders.

Dani Johnson:
If you do all those things, then shareholders should be taken care of, which I think is a really interesting way of looking at it. We see a lot of organizations proclaim to be purpose-driven, but when it comes right down to it, profit comes first. Talk to me about how that credo sort of makes itself known in the culture.

Clint Kofford:
Yeah. So when I interviewed three years ago, I mean, that was a big question that I was asking as well, because I think all of us have been in or have friends that work in companies where they have, you know, grandiose mission statements and whatnot, but they kind of live on the wall and that's about it. And I mean, I will say that it's hard to find a facility in a room where you are not going to find the credo hung prominently on display. But no, our credo really comes alive in how we make decisions on a daily basis. And, you know, I think front and center in everything that's going on in 2020, both from the health pandemic, as well as the pandemic of social injustice and racial inequalities, Johnson & Johnson has, you know, made decisions that are based in our credo around what we need to do.

Clint Kofford:
You know, we a line from our credo says, you know, we must respect the diversity and dignity of our employees. And I think it's, what's happened this summer, you know, with the social injustices has forced us to have, you know, more deep conversations with ourselves and with our vendors around what are we doing and how do we ensure that we are living up fully to our credo. And we are one of the best and constantly recognized in the world of diversity and inclusion for the efforts that we're making, but we're not satisfied with that, and believe that the continued need to live to this line in the credo, as well as many others. And, you know, another piece of work that I can cite this year is that we've come up with a purpose and career planner. So it's a body of work that allows our employees to be able to step back and think about what is their purpose and how does that really align with Johnson & Johnson, with their jobs.

Clint Kofford:
And we believe that that is helping us fulfill the credo as well. You know, we have a line again in paragraph two, it says our employees must have a sense of security, fulfillment, and purpose in their jobs. You know, so on top of traditional methods of engagement surveys and things that we would do to be measuring these, we’re out there actively trying to have conversations with our employees, help our managers have great conversations with their employees around what their skillsets are and how do we help them navigate this giant organization, but an organization with a big heart that wants to help people find this fulfillment and purpose. And, you know we're not naive. We know that the greater productivity, greater results happen when people find meaning and purpose in their roles. And so it's really kind of a win-win.

Dani Johnson:
I think this is particularly interesting because engagement has been such a big discussion in the last five or six years. And most of the engagement surveys that I read are, Hey, are you happy? The whole goal is to determine whether an employee is happy or not. I'm imagining that because of your credo and because of your purpose, your engagement survey may look a little bit different than others, getting to the heart of, you know, how do you feel purpose in your work rather than are you happy with what you're doing?

Clint Kofford:
No, I'd like to think so. I mean, I think we also have room to continue to tweak and fine tune, you know, how we ask some of these questions, but we definitely are interested in more than just the kind of typical engagement questions.

Dani Johnson:
And kind of, along with that, Clint, the, I mean, HR is involved in putting people practices into place and organizations. How does your purpose drive some of those aspects differently than they would in other organizations?

Clint Kofford:
That's where probably the credo comes in the most because we have our priorities in terms of what we need to do and how we need to do that. And so I think, you know, really just you having, you know, that people lens on our business and being able to use that as a kind of a balance to some of the business decisions that we make is really kind of what role HR plays. And, you know, I don't think anybody would say that we've always gotten it right, but we probably get a right most of the time. And certainly, I've learned from, you know, times and moments when we haven't got it as right. And I think part of the purpose of something like the credo is that there's also no clear-cut answer, right? And we use it as a set of guiding principles that help drive debate and discussion around what the right path forward is. These things do have to balance out, and I don't know that one shareholder or stakeholder in the credo can outweigh the others. And so it's awesome weighing out.

Chris Pirie:
It's not like a simple tool to help you make complex decisions really simple, but I'm interested in sort of coming in as a talent professional from the outside. And you think about the kind of suite of functions that a talent professional does in a hiring and retaining and developing and performance managing and all those kinds of things. What's your take on how this strong sense of purpose and in the culture of this organization, does it help any of those things particularly? Is there one of those functions where it makes a huge difference or even in functions where it makes things more complicated?

Clint Kofford:
I think we're trying to fully live into a lot of that a bit more. So I think, you know, I mean, certainly you can come to get into functions like HR and, you know, there may be probably very stereotypical of many HR functions, people that are very passionate about developing and growing other people and helping them to be their best. And they could go to our global community impact team. And I'm sure, you know, find people that are extremely passionate about how they represent Johnson & Johnson and how Johnson & Johnson can help, you know, some of these nonprofits and, you know, expand our influence and in parts of the world that maybe not be able to afford or as readily afford some of the things that we do. But I think, you know, one of the opportunities that I saw was coming in from the outside was that we talk and you feel so much about purpose, but you didn't see it as much in our processes and strategies as I would have expected.

Clint Kofford:
And so we have been on a journey to do that. And so, you know, one of the big strategies that we have in the, in the development space is this notion of a personalized career path. And how do we help create genres of careers or career archetypes that our people can begin pursuing? You know, I think with the democratization oof information in social media and mobile phones and whatnot, I think people have more occasions to question and to learn and to try and decide like what they want to be when they grow up. I think we're all kind of trying to continue to answer that and those questions and, you know, in a company, you have so many different avenues that you can be pursued. And some people are very clear from the very beginning about what that is and that North Star gets set out and, and they just want to know what is the path to get there?

Clint Kofford:
And others are looking for, you know, a variety of experiences and trying to kind of navigate the organization. So what we're trying to do is provide some avenues for those that are cleric can pursue those, whether that's being an expert and being valued having that role of an expert being valued across the enterprise, or being a very broadly based commercial or enterprise leader or somewhere in between. And that, you know, there's also the opportunities to kind of declare where you were at based on what your purpose is. And if that also necessitates a change. There are implications. You can't automatically go from having a depth of expertise to being a broad, you know, enterprise commercial leader. And so there, there may be other experiences that are required to get there, but if your purpose is changed, who are we not to be able to help you achieve that? And I think as we’re more honest with our talent and their aspirations, I think they could be more honest with us about what it is they want and how we can help them find that purpose of meaning.

Chris Pirie:
How are people responding to this?

Clint Kofford: I think people are excited we're in the earlier stages of trying to truly scale this. So lots of work ahead of us in truly kind of making this a big part of the fabric of development at Johnson & Johnson. But I mean, so far through the work that we've done on these on the purpose and career planner and some associated workshops like we are getting you have we have received a tremendous response and are struggling in some ways to keep up with the demand that is coming from that tool.

Chris Pirie :
It's really interesting. We talked to a gentleman called Aaron Hurst, who wrote a book on purpose, and as I've been researching this, a lot of companies have come to this sort of purpose-economy thinking driven by the aspirations of their individual employees. And it's something that a lot of people associate with millennial generation and after that. Your story here is almost kind of reverse it that, right? It's like the foundational principles of the organization embrace purpose. And now your job is to kind of put that into personal terms for the people who work there. Really interesting.

Clint Kofford:
Yeah, no, it is. And, you know, and I think that's probably part of the goal of any learning professional really is to, you know, take what are the unique assets and capabilities that come with an organization and harnessing all of that to really bring to life, you know, the best of that organization. And, you know, certainly in very fortunate that that purpose has those deep roots at Johnson & Johnson.

Chris Pirie:
Can we talk a little bit about this year, 2020? And one of the things we're interested in is how the disruption and the sort of acceleration in some ways towards a future of work where we're maybe more digital and more distributed and so on and so forth, but it's obviously driven a lot of change in people's sort of work habits and environments and activities. How has the pandemic, and you also mentioned the social unrest, impacted the world of work in your organization? And how has it made you think about your role perhaps in the future? And by the way, thanks for working on the vaccine. I read an article this morning that said you have a one-shot vaccine that’s progressing to stage three trials which is just aewsome.

Clint Kofford:
It is. It's amazing again what can be done and what the talent in our organization is able to do. I think this year, obviously for anybody, has been a year like none other and, you know, has challenged assumptions, has challenged our ability to work in new ways and to change paradigms. I think for us, and probably for many others as well, there was a path that led to more virtual-type of engagements and the use of technology. I mean, I think for us specifically, it has shown a light on the need for that. And, you know, frankly it can be as effective and I think it has to be done differently. It's not just putting everything into virtual formats and whatnot, that there is a great place for virtual learning, for the digitization of content.

Clint Kofford:
And I think if anything, it's accelerated our roadmap into more technology-driven learning experiences that is digitization of our content. But I also believe that it's also helped kind of reinforce that from a cultural perspective. As much as we do value some of the scale that would come and, you know, the ability to scale programs that would come through technology and the digitization, our culture really is about relationships. And, you know, a lot of I think a big part of our core programs. I mean, yes, they're there to build capability and individual leaders and in groups of, you know, high-potential leaders and not. I think part of it is about building culture and reinforcing, you know, who we are and how we lead. And those aspects, I think are still a little bit more unique and the value of the networking of the nuances that, you know, of a culture that come alive in a face to face are still going to be important. It's still going to be valued. And it's still something that we're planning on while trying to also take advantage of all the amazing benefits that technology can give us.

Chri Pirie:
It's amazing, isn't it? Because you, I mean, you know, medicine is a technology and obviously you are a technology company, but also a lot of your language and things that you've been talking about is physical, corporeal, right? And it's about the body and the physical health.

Dani Johnson:
I’m really curious. So you talked a lot about sort of marrying the body with the technology as we move forward. And you've also talked about the importance of relationships as you move a lot of things online. I'm just wondering if you have specific examples of things that you're doing to ensure that those relationships are maintained. And the reason that I ask is because this seems to be something that many organizations are struggling with.

Clint Kofford:
Yeah. I mean, I think maybe, you know, a simple example would be our program that we call our executive orientation. And so it's for all of our newly hired or newly promoted vice-president talent and above. And, you know, typically this is a four-and-a-half-day event in person, in New Brunswick that brings together these new leaders from all over the world into a room. Our executive committee spends a great deal of time with them over the course of this week. And they get exposure to other top enterprise leaders that help brief them on kind of what the expectations are of a senior leader and the resources available to them, you know, indoctrinate them in our philosophies around talent and leadership and whatnot. And there's a lot of networking, right? I mean, this builds the relationship. It's a lot of, you know, dinners and events and credo-based, you know, service, community service opportunities that connect them.

Clint Kofford:
And, you know, obviously pulling all those things off is very difficult in a virtual environment. And I think, you know, we've done a very nice job and all the kudos would go to my team. You know, they've, they've done a nice job, really being able to streamline the content. Then I think in some ways, it's a more effective format for we're laying some of the content and then they're just straight up downsized. You're not able to follow up and build any or connect with any of these executives that come in in a more one-on-one format. And I think we just have to recognize that's one of the downsides to this, and we're not going to make up for that, but we have created breakout opportunities for small groups to get together, set up one-on-one meetings. So there's a lot of things happening on the periphery of the core agenda that are attempting to help mitigate some of those senses of loss around, you know, relationship building and whatnot, you know, and I think the tension is the scale, and we normally can only get about 45 people through this program just because of space in a hotel.

Clint Kofford:
And we were able to get a hundred people through the program when we ran it in July. And so neither solution's perfect, but I think we were trying to emphasize on the merits that each brings and, you know, when we're able to, I see this again as a program that probably goes back to being a face-to-face type of event, but with so many learnings that we'll probably be able to be used and help us continue to get really effective at how content is distributed.

Dani Johnson:
I actually really love that. I think when COVID hit, most organizations were like, Oh no, how do I get all my ILT online? How do I make sure that that's all accessible to everybody? As the months have gone on, I've actually seen people really take advantage of technology to do completely different things and address things in completely different ways than they would otherwise. So I'm hoping, you know, as you mentioned, I hope other companies do the same thing that they take a look at maybe at what wasn't working as well or things that worked better in the new way and incorporate them once we sort of get back to normal.

Clint Kofford:
Yeah. I can give you another quick example. So we at the Human Performance Institute, we have our flagship program, which is called Performance. It’s a two-and-a-half-day program that takes place in Orlando. It's an absolutely amazing program. I've been very fortunate to have been exposed to lots of different development experiences in my career. And you know, this is the program that has impacted me the most. And I would have said that 10 years ago, along before I ever came to Johnson & Johnson, or got to work with the Human Performance Institute. And that was when the program was called the Corporate Athlete. But this performance program takes you to Orlando, puts you in a bubble, right? Our building creates this bubble. You're away from your family, you're away from the office. And you're able to kind of be in this perfect environment where we make sure that you are able to exercise and get, you know, help build up that quantity of energy physically, that you need.

Clint Kofford:
We're able to help educate and teach you around the things that you should be eating and the quantities that are going to help you drive that energy. We're able to give you time to step away and reflect on the quality of your energy and the relationships that you have that drive that meaning and purpose in your life. So it's this amazing bubble, right? Well, COVID hits. And, you know, we're still a commercial business this year and have some targets that we need to meet and contracts that we're expected to meet for customers. And so the team went back to the drawing board and said, well, if we can't actually create a, you know, the same bubble, like there's just no way we can do that. How do we use the environment that we are given, this absolute sense of real life that people are in, to our advantage?

Clint Kofford:
And so they rethought the program from the ground up. So it's a completely different experience. Instead of this perfect ideal bubble approach, it's the real-world approach. And now, instead of bringing you in and having you sit in one of the bod pods, we send you a scale. It's a very sophisticated scale that is extremely accurate that gives you a great readout around body mass index. And, you know, some of these factors that are really important to watch in terms of your health. And now you have that as a tool in perpetuity, you know, in your home. And instead of time away to sit and contemplate, you're right there with your family in your real-life environment. And you can go to these people in your life, friends and family, and have conversations with them about how are you showing up and bringing your best energy or not into conversations with them.

Clint Kofford:
We're able to ship you some food, you know, through one of these services like Blue Apron. And instead of, you know, this amazing, you know, high quality, healthy food showing up for you magically at our facility, you order it, you prepare it, and we make that a social experience. So we take all these factors that played against us, and we've turned them into assets for us because of the way we've flipped our content to meet the same need. And so, you know, that program is scored extremely well with our external clients. And I think it is a great example of how you can take the same intent and content, and just flip it to really be advantageous for you in a different environment.

Dani Johnson:
I really love that. I especially love the fact that you're focusing on the physical, not very many companies do it. It's not something that's generally thought of, but I love the fact that you're focusing on the physical. I want to ask two more quick questions before Chris asks his last question. The first one is, what do you think the toughest problems facing talent management or talent in general are in the immediate future?

Clint Kofford:
I'm going to go back to that comment I made around talent access. I mean, I think this is a really, you know, personally, a really messy and interesting space, and I don't know, you know, who's going to really crack the code on this first because from a sheer benefits perspective, people are willing to be contractors and they'd love the flexibility, but every contractor that’s worked for me, and this is, you know, whether I was at Mars or Nike or now J&J, they want the benefits. They want the perks, they want security, and they want the recognition that they actually were part of the brand, that it wasn't just, they're not just working for some staffing agency. I mean, they were doing work for Nike or for Johnson & Johnson. And, and I think that's a big deal, a big, big point of pride.

Clint Kofford:
And you have these co-employment laws that then also get in the middle of this and force us to go away from good talent, so we can find good talent, but we can only use them for so long. And we're not going to, and when I say we, I think this is all big companies, are just not, you know, extremely agile to be able to move kind of with the talent. And so I think figuring out what talent access really looks like, and how do gigs really play out because there's a lot of gig workers, but our enterprise procurement processes and stuff, they like big contracts with a global vendor, not these individual, you know, sole proprietors. So I think, figuring that out and how we can truly access. There's a lot of big talk, right? I think in this space, but making that really practical is one of the most exciting kind of horizons in this space.

Dani Johnson:
We actually agree. We just kicked off a study on mobility, like how people move in and around and out and in, how do you borrow talent and all that good stuff. So I'll probably be hitting you up for some ideas later on Clint.

Clint Kofford:
No, that'd be great. I would love your ideas.

Chris Pirie:
I agree. It's a massive challenge. And basically the regulatory system has not caught up with what people want. And I think it is going to be a huge challenge. And I'm really interested in whether, you know, this was a challenge that we faced at Microsoft too. We have a massive third-party network of resellers and partners of Microsoft. It dwarfs the actual population. And yet we were very heavily governed around how we could engage with people that worked with our partners.

Dani Johnson:
The whole idea that, you know, they can't attend certain things or they don't get certain trainings, or it's kind of heartbreaking.

Chris Pirie :
It breaks the model, but I just wonder, I want to put this thought out there and then you can ask the next question is whether this notion of purpose and the brand itself can be the glue that holds talent together for, you know, either in the short term or the long term. And I wonder what role purpose will play in that.

Clint Kofford:
I mean, I think it absolutely can. And I think, again, what's probably got to shift is some of our internal paradigms. And, you know, I think that's true of Johnson & Johnson, but I think it's all, you know, big, large companies. So it's our paradigms. I think it's a lot of, you know, the systems that are in place that incentive, you know, the behaviors and the rewards that come with, you know, full-time employment versus a contract or a gig or that sort of thing. I think purpose can play a big role there because that's what resonates with people. And, you know, I think the more we're able to engage people and have them feel like they're part of Johnson & Johnson and that they contributed directly to, you know, certain projects and that the company can also be comfortable knowing that, Hey, we have access to great talent and that talent may or may not choose to be with us for 5 years, 10 years.

Clint Kofford:
They may come in, and again, that could be coming in for a project that could be coming in for two years before, you know, spinning out to go do something else. And purposes really are aligned, then hopefully they'd be back. And, you know, really kind of building on that almost tour of duty concept that was, I think really well articulated in the book called ‘The Talent Alliance.’ But I think it's more of that type of mentality. That's going to bring purpose and as leaders can get more authentic and transparent about what is best for an employee, what the company can provide, and company and employees can be more clear about their purpose, you know, I think it's going to help drive a better mutual understanding about how to help develop and grow and accelerate careers that could be tied to, with purpose both from the company side as well as the individuals

Chris Pirie:
Looking at the time we got a couple of quick questions left. Do you want to go first, Dani? And then we'll wrap.

Dani Johnson:
Yep. That sounds good. So the final question we have is what advice would you give to other talent leaders who are trying to lead with a more purpose-aligned organization?

Clint Kofford:
That's a great question. I'm not sure that there's an easy answer because I think it's so hard if the company doesn't value purpose as much, right? And I've been very fortunate that at all the companies that I've been able to work for, purpose is baked in there somehow, right? And to varying degrees and whatnot, but it's there. And so I think I've been lucky and fortunate that there's been a bit easier way of making that happen. I think that could be very hard and probably the best advice would be just aligning with what the business is trying to achieve. And as they're able to do that notion or that part of the purpose may be able to come about. And I think, you know, just helping people be their best selves and bringing to light all the talent that is within the individuals and their organizations, that that's a very noble purpose in and of itself. I don't know if that's a very good answer.

Dani Johnson:
That’s a great answer.

Chris Pirie:
A great answer. Why did you choose to do the line of work that you do? Was there somebody or something or someone who inspired you to do the work that you do?

Clint Kofford:
So I can just share kind of succinctly my purpose is to bring hope to every employee at Johnson & Johnson. From my Nike days, I would put an asterisk after hope and define hope as being meaning and momentum. Really the objective that I have is to bring to that meaning and the momentum in a career to every employee at Johnson & Johnson. And for me, it actually stems back. I served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I was 19 years old, I lived in Russia and I have developed a deep love for the Russian people. I had the chance to live in the St. Petersburg area. And I think one of the things that just was so powerful in my time there was realizing, like I was on the streets, you know, daily interacting with people that had PhDs in economics, but we're working in a bread factory and, you know, people that had, you know, great musical talents, but the only jobs that they could find were at that time were, you know, an auto mechanic stores. And so I think there's just this need in all of humankind to achieve the best that's within them. And both, I think that is manifest in both being able to learn and grow. And so sometimes that's experiences like school or programs, but it's also momentum. It's just a feeling of forward progress in my career in it. And it doesn't always have to be upward, right? It can be, it can be lateral, it can be new, you know, in different areas of a business or of life. But I think people want to find that meaning and that satisfaction and they want momentum. And I think when people experience those two things, then they're going to do amazing things for the world. And you know, that those were some similar experiences for me in Russia that's kind of driven what I'm trying to achieve in my career for the companies that I've been blessed to work with.

Chris Pirie:
Thank you so much for sharing. Meaning and momentum. It's really good. Is there somewhere that people can connect with you or learn about your work? Either personally or through J&J?

Clint Kofford:
I'm more than happy to connect with people. You can find me on LinkedIn, talk about J&J or other things.

Chris Pirie:
Awesome, great insights. Thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Clint Kofford:
Absolutely. No, thanks. Thanks for having me.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
We're about halfway through our season and there's lots going on in the world relating to the topic of talent and purpose. So we have a two-part episode for you this time. In the second half of the hour, Dani, Stacia, and I will discuss a couple of recently released reports and some public statements that have a material bearing on our topic, but we're going to start the episode with a conversation that Dani and I had with Dan Pontefract. Dan is a leadership strategist, author, keynote speaker, and his bestsellers include ‘Lead. Care. Win. How to Become a Leader Who Matters,’ ‘Open to Think,’ ‘The Purpose Effect’ and ‘Flat Army,’ great title for a book. Dan was chief envisioner and chief learning officer at Telus, a Canadian telecommunications company with revenues in excess of $14 billion and over 50,000 worldwide employees. He launched the transformation office, the Telus MBA program, and the Telus leadership philosophy, all initiatives that drastically helped to increase the company's employee engagement. We started as usual with our set of questions designed to help sketch out Dan's work and career.

Dan Pontefract:
Dan Pontefract founder of the Pontefract Group, author, speaker, leadership strategist based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. And today is the 19th of October, 2020 vision. Well, I'm in the capital city of one of Canada's 10 provinces, British Columbia, that city, Victoria named yes, after the queen, moved here about eight years ago from Vancouver, where I spent 17 years in Vancouver. And prior to that, I grew up a bit in Ontario and Quebec in Canada. Born in England, Blackburn, Lancashire.

Dan Pontefract:
I am a leadership strategist, I like to refer to myself as, which is someone who's trying to help people, teams, organizations become better versions of themselves, which revolves around a three-legged stool. One of those legs is purpose. Another leg is culture. Another leg is how we think. And what unites it all, the seat, is this thing called leadership. I thought I was going to be a doctor. And then I realized that I didn't like blood, so that was bad. I dropped out or I guess I switched out of pre-med, at McGill University in Montreal and switched into the bachelor's of education and bachelor's of arts program. So I thought I was going to be a teacher. I lasted two years teaching high school of which then I morphed my way into higher ed, spent about six years at the Institute of British Columbia. and then the corporate world beckoned, and between 2000 to 2018, between SAP and Telus, so a high-tech company and a telecom, I was both a chief learning officer and something we call the chief envisioner, which was a totally made-up word to freak the press out.

Chris Pirie:
You have written four books. Is there a sort of core underlying theme that ties these ideas together?

Dan Pontefract:
Indeed, the way I looked at it, and there's a fifth one in the works incidentally, is that book one was taking a look at culture, like, what is corporate culture? What is organizational culture? How does it manifest? How's it suck? What's the link to employee engagement, if you will? And then I recognize there was no plan really to write another book, but I thought, well, there's something missing to culture. And that was the yin to the yang. And that's where I stumbled upon, back in 2014, this notion of purpose. And so I wrote a book based on kind of an investigation into some organizations and just my own thoughts, really about what we were doing at Telus at the time, which is a 50,000, $14 billion telecom, about how we might serve others basically was the premise. So book two was the yin to the yang with culture.

Dan Pontefract:
So ‘Flat Army’ being in the book was a culture. ‘The Purpose Effect’ was about purpose, but then the epiphany also rang true such that I recognized, ‘Well, we're not doing a very good job on culture change and certainly no one's, you know, deploying a sense of purpose or higher meaning. What's wrong?’ And so effectively I narrowed it down to one of several ailments and that was the way in which we think, and ‘Open to Think’ the third book, was me waxing lyrical, if you will, on how we've lost sight of marinading in the moment, Chris and Dani, how we don't creatively or critically think and how we're just addicted to busy-ness and distraction and social media and, you know, overburdened calendars. So that became a bit of an antidote and recipe for, well, if we want culture change to happen, if we want purpose to happen, maybe we need to take a look at our thinking.

Dan Pontefract:
And so that happened, that came out in 2018, and then I immediately went into work on book four, as soon as ‘Open to Think’ published incidentally, because I wanted to create, if you will, a book that was a field guide about leadership and the first three books were traditional hard cover, you know, 85,000-word books with tons of interviews, tons of research and, you know, thick, cerebral even. But I wanted something to be paperback, 35,000 words, and just sort of chock full of techniques and lessons on how to become what I call a leader who matters, which does pay homage to culture and does pay homage to purpose and does pay homage to thinking. But there's some other bits in there that ultimately help the user and the learner and the reader become a better leader.

Chris Pirie:
What kind of work are you doing today, Dan?

Dan Pontefract:
I left Telus, the offer mentioned telecom, full-time on January 1, 2019, and went out on my own. I went on my own and started the Pontefract Group, which is in Paul Jarvis's language, a company of one, but I'm out there helping organizations and/or individuals who are interested in, you know, how their organization operates, if they want it to be a little more transparent, open collaborative. If they're thinking about, you know, this fad, Chris and Dani called purpose, what do we do here? And again, so based on the books, I'll do talks, I'll do consulting, you know, I've done organizational redesign, you know, typical CHRO CLO, you know, experience officer type stuff to help others.

Dani Johnson:
So I'm super interested. Was ‘The Purpose Effect’ your first book or your second book?

Dan Pontefract:
It was book number two.

Dani Johnson:
I'm fascinated with it. Well, we are fascinated with the idea of purpose, and I’m really interested in what prompted you to write that.

Dan Pontefract:
It really, as I kind of began to, you know, dig into the work of Roger L. Martin and the work of Charles Handy and the work of Clayton Christianson and just like greats before us, it really struck me as a practitioner inside an organization of how culture is supposed to be working, that we were missing out on something at Telus. Don't forget as its chief learning officer, I was helping to create back in 2008, 2009, 2010, this something called the Telus Leadership Philosophy. And the TLP as we affectionately called it was our North Star. It wasn't just, you know, values on a wall. It was a working, operating behavior guide for how we were supposed to interact with each other. But the first thing that we did was we defined our target audience, who are we leading? You know, it took about a year and a bit to put the TLP together and to launch it into the organization in the summer of 2010.

Dan Pontefract:
But one of the things, which we weren't calling it purpose at the time, incidentally which, which we've now gone back and refined it as social purpose, nonetheless. We were very clear from the get-go in the TLP that we would affect our leadership toward four key audiences, and the four audiences that we ended up defining as part of the TLP, were as follows. I mean, obviously customers. So our customers we serve, our team members, the business—so that would be those due a fair return from a financial means perspective, so shareholders, investors, et cetera—and community. That became the launchpad for me, because as an organization, we said, ‘No. Community is the word we're going to use, and that's how we're going to serve.’ And what landed on me was, well, actually, that's the who, that's who we're serving. How do we do it? The how was where the word purpose came in. And so then I started trying to figure out, well, what is purpose? And that's where I then found that there's actually three types of purpose, which if you want to go into that, I'm happy to.

Dani Johnson:
How did you guys land on purpose? I mean, in a world where everybody really is focused on, you know, shareholder value and profits, how did you sort of wrap your organization around the idea of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
Shareholder return and to a degree, EBITDA are actually outcomes of what you stand for and how you operate as an organization. We know that on a global basis, we're still stuck at 87-ish percent of the world disengaged or not engaged at work, but there's a correlation as well when you kind of dig down to the next layer of the causal relationship between culture or engagement and purpose. When the organization feels as though its intent, its belief, its actions are indeed working for a higher purpose, i.e., community, i.e., others, not just EBITDA, shareholder return, et cetera, then what happens is it triggers a sense of engagement and community itself in the organization. I don't know if we, Dani, actually knew what we were doing back in 2010 through 2013, 2014, but we knew enough to say back then, there's more to us than just shareholder return.

Chris Pirie:
The nature of the work that Telus does, connecting people, do you think that had anything to do with how you got to like community, in particular, but purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
I think that’s a fair query, Chris. To be honest, it was, the organization, sorry, was a public Crown corp up until 1999 and very unionized shop. But, at the end of the day, Telus itself circa 2001 became a publicly traded organization. And the machinations that go along with becoming publicly traded where you served any sort of, you know, crown Corp ethos that was originally is lingering if you will, because it's the notion of an organization's singular mandate for many, if not all publicly traded organizations, other than maybe Unilever back in 2010, was what? It's to serve the stock market and the analysts every quarter. I have an example and it's a large company that everybody knows and most people use. And the situation is circa middle of April 2020. And there are some whistleblowers at everyone's favorite online shopping mall Amazon that are discussing work conditions in the factories, in the warehouses.

Dan Pontefract:
And there's a VP of cloud computing. His name is Tim Bray, and Tim Bray, albeit Canadian, working out of Vancouver, goes through the regular channels inside of Amazon, right? To highlight his disdain for how these whistleblowers are being fired for complaining about the lack of safety in the warehouse. And so, because he's a VP and he says this on a public blog post, he said, I wanted to follow the right protocol and the right chain of command by being then and subsequently ignored and, you know, shushed, Tim was left with a decision. He looked at his sense of self, meaning purpose. What does the organization stand for? And what's role in all of this, which is just very simply the three types of purpose that I believe are found in all of us and must intersect.

Dan Pontefract:
And when they're not in lock step, you know, either we have to make a decision or you have to live with it. And Tim Bray made a decision. He quit publicly in a blog post, outing, you know, the situation that just had unfolded and saying, ‘Look, this is not my values. This is not essentially my purpose. And so I'm out.’ And I think that's encapsulates for many, just as a microcosmic story, what goes on. It's that organizations might say, and again, this is not Amazon example now, but organizations might say they operate with a great sense of purpose. That's the what, but the how, the behaviors, do they actually serve community? Do they actually serve all stakeholders and not just shareholders? That's what gets frightening.

Dani Johnson:
Let's talk about those three things. You've mentioned them a couple of times. In your book, you discuss three types of purpose, personal purpose, which I think we just got a really good view of with Tim Bray. The second one is a role purpose and an organizational purpose. You talk about them in sort of three separate chunks, critical relationship between the three. So talk about why, why three, and then what's the relationship between them.

Dan Pontefract:
I think what some authors or researchers and writers and others have done a really fantastic job of is that sense of personal purpose? You know, who am I, what do I stand for? And what I like to cheekily say, as part of your personal purpose, how do I want to be known when I leave a room? But what dawned on me, Dani, was that if the individual who wakes up in the morning and is Dan or Dani or Chris, as a sense of personal purpose, has to go to work. And doesn't recognize that there's actually two other types of purpose that they're getting in the car or the subway and going into work for, then they're in deep trouble. Because if they're not aware that they should be feeling a sense of purpose in their role at work, does their work give them a sense of meaning and value?

Dan Pontefract:
Do they feel valued by their team, by their organization, by their boss? So role purpose, as I call it also has a nice employee engagement. Do you feel engaged in what you do? But then of course, there's this, the elephant in the room, and that is the organization. If the organization's purpose is one in which it’s only focused and fixated on profit or harming the environment, or not caring about giving to the community, you know, if that runs like nails on a chalkboard to you, do you think you're going to kind of be in a sweet spot, Dani, do you think that it's all going to connect? Now we have decisions to make just like Tim Bray did.

Dani Johnson:
So, whose responsibility is it for alignment of those three things if those three things are sort of necessary in order to give somebody a sense of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
What a great question. Yeah. it's actually twofold. So again, I believe, and I've seen this where there's a principled stance that the organization has to take to ensure that their employees, their team members feel and can actualize purpose in the role. And because it's an ecosystem because we're all in this together, I do truly believe that that organization also must extend its hand to help the team member with their own sense of personal purpose. But then flip it around, whether it's temporary or otherwise, we must always be curating, developing, questioning who we are in our own life, i.e., personal purpose. But we also have to recognize that there's a development path in our career, and we're going to have to learn that role purpose is actually a journey as well. It's not instantaneous. But again, if we think that there's things in our role over time, let's say that are really contradictory to our sense of purpose of self or the organizations, then we got to do something about it. Maybe it was the wrong role. Maybe it's the wrong organization, Dani. So there's two, the organization has a responsibility, I believe, whether you're CEO, C-suite, CHROs, CLOs. But also you coming into the organization, you got some muscle building to do as well.

Dani Johnson:
Do you think that's a fairly, a relatively new construct, this idea of organizations having some responsibility in helping people find their purpose, or do you think that's always existed?

Dan Pontefract:
There are some great examples out there. Dannon Yogurt, you know, those folks back in, I think it was 1970, 1968, somewhere around there. You know, there's an example of an organization that says right from the get-go, this is how we're going to operate. This is our ‘graze on dirt,’ if you will, they call it responsible capitalism. And they said from there that they would support community, they'd support their employees. They would support the environment. This is like 1970. When, you know, Uncle Milt, Friedman put out his famous New Yorker report or article or essay that said shareholder capitalism, shareholder primacy is how we should be operating our organizations. And Reaganomics and Thacher-nomics took, took hold and, you know, that's what we've been stuck in ever since.

Chris Pirie:
What advice would you give to talent leaders and CLOs in terms of how they approach this topic of purpose?

Dan Pontefract:
I'd say, first and foremost, make sure that you've, you know, developed it, declared it, defined it, and you've communicated it so that you can point to it. And its examples. So whether it's videos or stories, that's kind of important first and foremost. Secondly, on the attraction point itself, if you're not having a conversation, let's say, you know, in the interview stage or in the submission stage about a, what is our purpose? but b, how do you see our purpose meshing with yours? Because we want to be hiring the right type of people who are going to enact and continue on, you know, in the sense of hopefully operating with a higher sense of meaning. I think that's really important to have it upfront out in the open and in the conversations of, you know, the interview stage even. And then when you're a CLO or CHRO and you're in the organization, again, back to that earlier point, when Dani and I were chatting about, you know, the two types of responsibility, that organization, I do believe, has a fiduciary responsibility to inculcate purpose into the pedagogy and curricula of the organization.

Dan Pontefract:
So whether that's in the onboarding piece, for example, right, just sort of getting your feet wet if you will, but then having either purpose workshops that are ones about, you know, your own personal sense of purpose, having leaders in a webcast series, you know, its purpose month in February. So we're going to chat with five or 10 VPs, et cetera, about what it is that their sense of purpose, personal purposes, not even thinking about whatever your company name is, just them as people, when we're weaving it into our curriculum and pedagogy, our career pathing actually becomes systemic.

Chris Pirie:
There is maybe a danger to all this. And that is, I know Dani feels strongly about sort of like mono-cultures in organizations and you end up with a lack of diversity if you're just hiring people for sort of culture fit. Do you think that's a possible downside of this?

Dan Pontefract:
I do believe that you can use purpose and your culture and your values to make good decisions and better decisions that revolve around your ethos, you know, your way of being, but I wouldn't hire folks as sort of a group-think hire. Oh, we better all think this way. Then we end up with a very, you know, staid, placid, not very differentiating type of organization.

Chris Pirie :
Perhaps we can talk a little bit, Dan, about the dreaded COVID 2020, how has it changed how you think about purpose and secondly, what do you think is the job to be done next as we start to hopefully put work back together?

Dan Pontefract:
I don't think purpose and this, you know, operating with a sense of higher meaning is as foreign a concept as it was back in 2015, 2016. I think we're actually inching our way to it being part of the vernacular and lexicon of how we operate. And we can thank several organizations. Satya Nadella as he came on as CEO at Microsoft, clearly waxed lyrical five years ago-ish when he came on about how we need to operate, not just for a sense of EBITDA, but for others. I think Paul Pullman, a great example at Unilever starting in 2010, and continue now with Jop, its CEO as well. And then the work of Larry Fink at BlackRock and his annual January letter in January of 2019. He said, look, if we're not operating with a sense of purpose, why are we here?

Dan Pontefract:
And then follow that up with the January letter of 2020 with we better all become environmentalists. It's open when you're trading $7 trillion, Chris, as they are kind of the world's largest shadow bank, Fink has, is helping us see the light if you will. There are some examples and, you know, there's some shining stars that are starting to shine a little brighter. Now the pandemic hits, you know, and what I'm noticing is a couple of things. First of all, there are still a bunch of morons out there that think they can hierarchically pound their way into increasing or at least sustaining their revenues or their profit levels by not caring either for their people or with a sense of purpose with community, just so asinine. Whether it's an Amazon example or otherwise, there are a ton that I've been observing. I mean, a ton, I've kept track of them on a spreadsheet because I keep coming into them.

Dan Pontefract:
But that said, as horrible as this pandemic has been, somewhat obviously it's a tragedy, it's a human tragedy. It has also, I think, awakened many C-suites from where they were to where they ought to go, and let us not, you know, discount the civil unrest from Brianna to George Floyd, et cetera, right? There is a palpable, I believe, pent-up, global frustration with how many organizations had been operating. And so, you know, what it comes down to, I certainly truly believe, Chris and Dani, is empathy. There is such a relationship between empathy and purpose that our organizational leaders that are CLOs and CHROs need to start teaching about empathy and its relationship to purpose. And empathy, very quickly to me, there's three types that I've kind of observed. And I call it head, heart, and hands. The head empathy, if you will, which is known as psychologist called cognitive empathy, is how we intellectualize how someone else is thinking about something.

Dan Pontefract:
So you think about how they're thinking. You use your head to get inside their head. What's known as emotional empathy is the feelings part. How is someone feeling about a particular situation? And then the last one is known as sympathetic empathy, and that's what I call the hands. Are you willing to do something about it because you now understood how they're thinking and feeling. So back to purpose. If we're teaching as CLOs and CHROs in the organization about purpose, you know, purpose of self, purpose of role, purpose of org, I think we need to also fill the gap of empathy by teaching the relationship of purpose to empathy and how, when we think and feel and do, we can then understand that we're not in this, i.e., life, just for ourselves or just for our own organizational needs. We empathize of how others are thinking in the community, about the environment, how our employees are thinking about how we're treating the environment or the community, if we're turning a blind eye, you know, not doing enough that serve those in need. I think that that relationship is going to be key for CLOs going forward.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think are the main things that we've got to get done as we sort of move into hopefully the next phase and we sort of put work back together again? And how can purpose kind of help us think about that?

Dan Pontefract:
I can't stand, to be honest with you two, the notion of the new normal. I've been yapping away calling it the Great Reset. So this is, we had the Great Recession. We've had the Great Depression. I think this is such a wonderful opportunity for us to inculcate a Great Reset. How are we defining ourselves in our work and use this time, you know, to come back to this, the reset of how work ought to occur when we'll be in, I hope, hybrid models. I hope in achieving a different way of operating our business, our organizations. So if we can reset a few things in this time that we've got till the vaccine comes and look at our behaviors, look at our way in which that we might be developing or not developing our people in the organization with purpose, look at how we're hiring or not hiring people with a sense of purpose, look at how our organization has or doesn't have a declaration of purpose, a purpose statement that says, this is what we stand for and how we operate in our community and in the world.

Dan Pontefract:
There's all kinds of chances as people are planning for 2021 right now, as we know at the time of this recording, and mid-October, it's a chance to reset, so that when we do have the vaccine, it's never going to go back to the old normal, because that assumes it actually was normal.

Dani Johnson:
One question that we always ask our guests particularly for this podcast, because we think it's fairly poignant is about your own personal purpose and especially as you went over your career. We would love to ask you why did you choose the line of work that you chose? How did you end up where you are and who hired you to do the work you do?

Dan Pontefract:
When SAP, the company that I did work for, the reason I ended up working for SAP was because it acquired the company I was CLO for, which was a company called Business Objects based in Paris, but locations around the world, had about 10,000 employees, just under a billion in revenue. And it was a business intelligence software company at the time in my life. SAP came in in 2007 and acquired the company. And for about a year, I tried in earnest to sell them, SAP that is, in Germany on what our culture was. I mean, the business objects culture was one of family just to put it bluntly. And we were already back in that day, we had a community investment team and that was about 10 people. And you talk about philanthropy. I think this company, business objects defined what it meant to be a philanthropic kind of purpose-driven company. Anywho. During the time in which SAP acquired us and I was making way too many trips to Frankfurt to convince them of our culture, I also, living in Vancouver, started climbing something known as Gross Mountain, which is in Northend. It's just a 1.8-kilometer up hike. I was doing that like two or three times a week, and I got it down to about 42 minutes, straight up, but I kept swirling around these words, like what, you know, why? What's struggling with me? Why can't I, why can't this fit? Why is SAP feeling like this? It just nails on a chalkboard. It's just not cool. So after, I don't know, a bunch of times, I say, you know what I need, I called it a mission statement at the time, Dani. I need my personal mission statement. Like I'm, something's wrong here. And so I ended up landing on the following. ‘We're not here to see through each other, we're here to see each other through,’ and that line or the kind of two-line, pithy statement there got me thinking about how I need to help SAP see through the fact that they don't get it. I had to find a home for my 120 odd team members because I had decided to leave because I was not in a sweet spot with SAP. So I had to see these folks through, I had to find, make sure they all had jobs and make sure they're all taken care of. And so once that was done, once I sort of made peace with myself, I announced my departure. And then used that kind of purpose statement from 2008 onwards.

Dani Johnson:
Just to wrap up. We know you’ve written several books, Dan. We know you’re out there. We’d love for you to just tell us where people can learn more about your work and how they can connect with you.

Dan Pontefract:
Maybe we'll just go to the latest book. It's called ‘Lead. Care. Win’ and you just go to www.leadcarewin.com and you'll find me and the book and all the rest of them there, including the purpose book.

Chris Pirie:
Thank you for sharing your wisdom around this, Dan, and your personal story as well.

Dan Pontefract:
Thanks for doing what you’re doing.

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TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Hi, I'm Rachel Fichter and I am the global head of talent and leadership at S&P Global. And today's date is October 12, 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Rachel, welcome to ‘Learning Is the New Working’ and the series that we're doing with RedThread on the topic of purpose. So if you’re ready to go, we’ll dive in.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I am ready to go and happy to be here.

Chris Pirie:
Great. So we always ask people where they live and where they work and why.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, right now I'm actually in Cologne, Germany, but I'm normally based in New York City. And, of course, there is nothing normal about life at the moment. And since I can do my job from anywhere, for personal reasons, I'm currently spending a few months here in Europe with my husband, who's working.

Chris Pirie:
How would you describe the kind of work that you do at S&P Global?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah, sure. So my title is global head of talent and leadership. And I would start by saying it's interesting because I was recently speaking with my chief people officer who told me that the word talent is so outdated and I should come up with a new title. So I am open to ideas.

Chris Pirie:
What do you think, Dani?

Dani Johnson:
We're hearing a little bit about that too, a little bit of backlash against the word talent, because it dehumanizes folks.

Chris Pirie:
I hear a lot about people trying to get away from 'human resources' as a phrase, but I haven't heard any backlash against the word talent.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah. And I think it not only does maybe dehumanize, but I think in the past it referred to a select group of people. And as I see the talent role evolving, ultimately talent is around our people, and it becomes, it has a much broader, I think, it now has a much broader connotation than it used to. Last week, I attended a conference and I noticed that everybody who was a chief talent officer or head of talent was talking about all of the people and not just a small subset of people. So either we're saying that all of our people are talent, or we should be thinking about it in a different way. Maybe that's another way of looking at it.

Dani Johnson:
Can I ask a quick question on that, Rachel? I have a soapbox right now where I'm just mad at every organization that has a HiPo program, because I think they're fairly biased. And as you mentioned, they focus on a really small group of people. I was just wondering kind of what your thoughts are with respect to that.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
It's a great question, Dani, and something that I've really been thinking a lot about, you know, in my role and also connected to some of the work that we've been doing to promote racial equity. So there are several things that I've been working on around bias. And one of the things that I'm now doing is looking at how to use data to inform decisions around people who are part of a HiPo program, because I agree with you that managers tend to have biases. We all have biases, right? I think that's pretty clear. We all have biases. And if we're just looking to our managers and maybe to the people function to give us the names of people, we are going to miss out on others who might have lots of potential. And so one of the things that I've been doing is really looking at data and how do we leverage data to help us find people in the organization who might be missed because of those biases.

Chris Pirie:
I see. I get it. So the word talent has some echoes of sort of an elite, this notion that there is some people who are talented. Rachel, can you tell us a bit about S&P Global for people who are not familiar with your organization? What's the business model and what service does it provide?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
S&P Global is a global financial data and analytics company. Basically, we turn data into insights for people to make investment decisions. So we analyze data from millions of different sources to deliver actionable insights that help investors and a range of different people involved in the financial markets to grow their own revenues, to manage risk, and make any range of business decisions.

Dani Johnson:
Can you tell us a little bit about the organization population, the major job roles, and sort of some of the dominant demographic trends you're seeing?

Dr Rachel Fichter:
So we have about 22,000 people around the globe. We are a very global organization. About half of our people are in Asia, in particular in India and Pakistan. And, in addition to kind of all of the typical functional roles that you would find in any organization, finance, risk, et cetera, we have domain specialists, our ratings analyst, people who do research, people who do editorial work.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We have roles that we call content roles and data roles. So I remember being surprised when I first started that we have employees who are members of the same union as journalists are. And that's because we do a lot of publishing. And of course, sorry, I should also add that it won't come as a surprise that technology is really important to our business. We are increasingly a technology-driven business. We have a small army of amazing data scientists. We have software developers, cloud engineers, UX designers, InfoSec and, and our technology function operates solely in agile as well as other functions actually, such as mine, the people function. We also are operating in agile as well.

Dani Johnson:
I’d like to understand what ‘agile’ looks like for the people organization.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We created a people agility function about a year and a half ago. And so we took all of these people who had traditionally been aligned to different functions. So like within the talent function, I actually have, well, I have one direct report, but that's really a legacy thing. Generally speaking, I get everything done through these project teams that come together from this group of people in the people-agility function now, and then work together with that team using agile methodology, agile practices, rituals, to lead those projects. And so one of the projects that I'm leading, just to give you an example, is reimagining the performance experience. And we have a team of about six, full-time team members. Plus we have some people who work with us on a part-time basis, and they are all team members. We create user stories. I have a scrum master, and then everybody, they take their user stories, choose which ones they want to do every other week.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We do sprint planning on a biweekly basis, and it's just a really great way to manage a project. And what I'm finding is that people are getting the opportunity now to dive into areas that they weren't familiar with before, they're expanding their skillsets. They're learning, you know, about new aspects of being in a people function. I have, for example, have one person who's on the comp team. And he's been doing quite a bit of work in the performance space, partly because he has the comp expertise, but also, he's been doing many other parts of the performance, you know, thinking about the new performance experience. And I think everybody's having an opportunity to learn new skills and become broader in, you know, in what they're able to do as a result of that. So yeah, so several of us in these types of project-oriented roles, like the one I'm in where, you know, whether it's a talent program that I'm running or, you know, manager development or performance project, all of these are run using people who come together specifically for the purpose of executing these projects.

Dani Johnson:
I love this idea. I think we talked about teams a lot in some industries, but I love the fact that you're using it specifically for the people practice. And I love the outcome that everybody is learning different things about different parts of the organization, but also really developing some skills that can be used later. I love that idea. Does your organization have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, what is it?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yes, we do. And it is, ‘We accelerate progress in the world by providing intelligence that is essential for companies, governments, and individuals to make decisions with conviction.’

Dani Johnson:
That's really strong. How deeply is it connected to sort of your core business model and your operations?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I would say it's increasingly connected and that actually accelerated over the past couple of years. We became S&P Global about four years ago. Previously, we were McGraw Hill Financial. And when we became S&P Global, we refocused our strategy, called it ‘powering the markets of the future.’ And since then, we've been consistently looking to define what we do in terms of accelerating progress. And that's been a really powerful motivator for people to come up with ideas around what does that look like? What does accelerating progress look like? One example is our strategic focus on ESG. And for those of you who aren't familiar with that, it's environmental, social, and governance. And we have a range of different products in that space that help our companies to understand where they are with respect to accelerating progress in whether it's with respect to climate change, to social justice and governance issues that they might be facing as companies.

Chris Pirie:
So let me see if I can understand that. So you're creating products, sort of information products that are helping people who want to invest with one of those kinds of lenses. Is that an example of the kind of work?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, actually what we would be doing is we would be creating products that help evaluate companies for investors. And sometimes we it's a range of different kinds of products, right? So there are several different products that we have in this space, but one of those would be to help a company understand where it stands with respect to those and how it compares. And we also factor that into when, for example, if we're evaluating a company as well.

Chris Pirie:
So I think one thing is your, this sort of, the sense of purpose that you have as an organization has resulted in new products and new go-to markets.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think that's a really interesting question. I'm not sure if it's the chicken or the egg here, but I would say that, I guess this goes to this question of if a purpose is an articulation of the reason for existence, then I would say that we ended up articulating something that we were already living, right, because we've been working in the ESG space for a while. And we were working in that before we actually articulated this idea of accelerating progress in the world. But I believe that part of it is that actually you can't just come up with a purpose that doesn't match who the organization is. You really have to think about, it has to be something that is you. And so I think really what we were doing was simply articulating that. And I think that then you can take that and then own it and shape your organization and your products and your culture and your people around that in a more intentional way.

Chris Pirie:
Is it possible for you to share with us anything about the process of coming to that purpose statement?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, as I said, there were several things going on. One was we had become McGraw Hill Financial in a split with McGraw Hill Education several years earlier. And then from McGraw Hill Financial, we rebranded ourselves as S&P Global about four years ago. And after that, we started really looking at ourselves as a company. And actually, I think some of this happened when we hired our new chief people officer. So we actually went from being an HR function to a people function which is also very much in line with how at least I envisioned accelerating progress, which is with our people. But I think that our chief people officer at the time when she started a couple of years ago, she also created a new function, which was a head of culture. And which was to say that we were intending to focus explicitly on our culture. And it was as part of that work that we ended up refining our purpose statement and not changing our values, but refining the meaning of them for us.

Dani Johnson:
One final question and kind of along those veins, I'm really interested in how you're thinking about stakeholder relationships. So some of the organizations we've been talking about, they're no longer just thinking about the shareholder on the outside, but also the employee, the customer, this player, you know, the actual shareholders, partners, society, those types of things. As you were putting together your purpose statement, can you talk to us a little bit about how those groups were taken into account, or if they were taken into account?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
They absolutely were taken into account. So if we go back, I think to, what was it, maybe the middle of 2019? I'm pretty sure it was somewhere in 2019. The Business Roundtable came out with a new statement of purpose for the corporation, where they said we are no longer going to live by this idea that the only purpose that a company has is to make, generate profits for a shareholder, right, i.e., Milton Friedman, and that we are going to look at all of our stakeholders, our people, our customers et cetera. And so we actually, it was all this time. So we are a signatory of that Business Roundtable new statement, our CEO was, and it was just at that time also that we did reshape that purpose statement. So I believe that that purpose statement is very much in line with accelerating progress.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And, and I guess the way I look at it is I, first of all, I think you need to make an assumption that, you know, that you interpret progress as helping to improve all people's lives, right? Because you could, you know, anybody could make that very narrow and say, you know, accelerating progress for our shareholders, but that's definitely not how we intend it. So I think that it's absolutely very, very central is that our people come first, and we have adopted a people-first approach with everything we do. We actually even have now, I think we're in people-first 6 dot 0 right now. We've come up with a range of different initiatives and support, I'd say more than initiatives, for our people over the last two years that have really shifted us from let's say away from being more focused on a shareholder to much more focused on our people in our communities.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I would also, however, say that we've always been a very community-oriented company, and that's also I think one of the reasons why we've always had a collaborative and caring kind of culture. And that is another one of those things where I say that we've now articulated sort of this, this kind of collaboration and care as an output of what we already have. You'll see that, for example, in, you know, in our people proposition now, but it's, I think it's also another one of those things that was there all along and that we just have now called it out.

Chris Pirie:
It's great that you mentioned the Business Roundtable. We actually start our whole season with a quote around that. What was the process and what was the experience of kind of landing this purpose statement in the culture of the organization and were you in your L&D role any part of that?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think we need to look at L&D in a slightly different way in our company. We don't even have an L&D function, right? So we don't have a learning and development function, not in the traditional sense. Learning at S&P Global is actually quite decentralized. So we have business-led learning that sits in the divisions, and then we have the talent and the leadership space, which is centralized. And then we have a group that focuses on culture, right? So I mentioned earlier that we have a head of culture. We also then extended that to have having a head of people engagement as well. So if you look at it, it's really kind of the sum total of those three groups who have been responsible collectively for, you know, thinking about how do we, first of all, how do we engage our people in a dialogue around what our purpose should be?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And so we went through and it was very much a business-led endeavor as well. It wasn't something that was, you know, relegated to the people function. It was a business leader-led initiative where we went, there were many, many, many iterations over many months where we had dialogue around what would be, also together with our colleagues in the public affairs and corporate communications and branding and thinking. There were so many different functions involved in kind of thinking about, well, you know, what is it that we do really well? What is it that that we want to really focus on? And what is our purpose, right? As opposed to just putting something on paper and then trying to disseminate that.

Chris Pirie:
A real dialogue across the whole organization with leader-led, but lots of participation.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Absolutely.

Dani Johnson:
Rachel, I'm really interested in how that's changed the way you do your job. And if there are sort of specific examples you can give us about how that purpose, that definition of purpose has really impacted the overall way you run your people practices.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's changed a lot. The biggest shift that I've seen, I think, as a result of this and leading up to it was our people-first strategy. So as I mentioned earlier, we came out with this people-first 6 dot 0 last week. So that means that we have six iterations of what it means to be people first. So aside from completely transforming our benefits, for example, on the learning side, we now offer a tuition reimbursement in the US up to $20,000 a year from 5, to promote a learning culture. And that's part of accelerating progress, right?

Chris Pirie:
That's a pretty explicit statement.

Dani Johnson:
That’s impressive. Wow.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
There you go. If you spend $10,000 of that on learning and you happen to have outstanding student loan debt, you can get the remaining $10,000 for that year to pay off. We just announced a global care leave policy of six weeks to take care of a child or an elder during COVID-19. And we also just announced that Juneteenth will become a company holiday next year. So those are just a few examples, and I have so many more of what we have done to shift the focus. And of course we're still focused on our shareholders, right? There's, obviously we are, because we can't do all of these things for our people if we're not in business, right? Really taken this commitment to a whole new level.

Dani Johnson:
That's amazing. Are there challenges that have arisen because of so many changes that you’ve made?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
You know, it's hard to be fully focused on, you know, doing things for our people. We will always have to make decisions and tradeoffs. And so I guess, yes, you could say that sometimes we do have challenges, you know, and there's always more that we should be doing that we haven't done. And I guess one of the things that happens as a result, you know, you become a, maybe you become a victim of your own success because there's always more that you can do and more that you should be doing, but we just don't have, we can't do it all. And we can't do it all at once.

Chris Pirie:
Is it different to be a talent leader in a purpose-driven organization, in terms of the impact of having a purpose on the core HR function?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I actually love having a purpose like this. I mean, I, you know, we shouldn't forget that all companies have had a purpose and in the past, it's just maybe that purpose wasn't as altruistic or, you know, as meaningful as it might've been. I actually see, you know, my focus is on enablement and development. And part of my job is to help leaders define at a more granular level what accelerating progress means, and then translate that into an inspiring vision for their organizations and their teams. So I actually really liked Simon Sinek’s term for vision. He calls it a just cause. And I think that if I can help leaders identify just causes for their own just cause, and then get people on board to follow that, which is under the umbrella of the overarching purpose of our company, that's going to be a really good outcome.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And it certainly gives me something to hang my hat on and something that I can feel proud of as well personally, right? Because I want to do something meaningful with my life. And I want to feel like that I'm making an impact and that I'm helping people to do something meaningful and do it better. And so feeling like I have something that, you know, like accelerating progress and how I envision that and how I can help leaders to do that and translate that into something, you know, important for their people gives me a sense of purpose as well. So I actually really like it.

Chris Pirie:
Can we talk about this year, 2020? The global pandemic, the social unrest and the calls for social justice around the world, I think have been cause for reflection for pretty much everybody. I wonder how it's impacted your operations and your work so far, at least.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Well, I would say that COVID in many ways has helped us to accelerate our purpose. And also the calls for social justice. In terms of COVID, manager flexibility has been a key topic area. We've expanded our coaching offering significantly to help managers deal with the challenges of remote work. Actually we had a really great alignment with some of the work we were doing around reimagining the performance experience because we were, as part of that and part of some of the experiments that we've been doing in that space, we were also eliminating performance ratings and a large part of our business chose to eliminate the performance ratings at the midyear because the whole concept of how could you measure performance in an environment like this? It's just, it takes on such a different meaning.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And, you know, COVID is something that we all, it's something that binds us, and you know, that we all face together as humanity, but it's also something that plays out in very unique and different ways for each individual. And there are some people who have small children, there are other people who have elderly parents. There are people who had no network access in some of the locations where we do business. So being able to do your job just takes on a very different meaning and picking up the slack or, you know, picking up areas where your teammates can't work doesn't mean that you should get a better performance rating at midyear. It means that you're a great team player and that you've really supported people when they needed it, but to put people at a disadvantage because they didn't have a network connection or because they have children who they had to homeschool, I think, you know, that's something that we were really looking seriously at and trying to help managers to be able to come up with new ways of support, you know, working with their employees and getting the job done. And actually, I think in many ways, our productivity has been through the roof in spite of all of these challenges and even in spite of not having any, given any ratings out and midyear. So that's one area on the COVID side.

Dani Johnson:
It seems like you're very optimistic about the future of your organization. And I love, love, love some of the changes that you made. I'm wondering if your organization is viewing them as sort of, especially the things that are wrapped around COVID, if you're seeing them as sort of stop gaps until we get back to normal, or do you think it will literally change the way you do work?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I have no doubt that it will change how we do work in the future. I mean, look, we all know that the future of work was coming and we all know that in a way it's being accelerated right now, and we have a massive, massive strategic project right now called ‘Project Reimagine’ where we are using not only COVID, but also looking at many things that have happened recently, including you know, the calls for social justice, as a way of really reimagining how we work in the future. So I think that we're using this as an opportunity. We were already planning on experimenting with no ratings, even pre-COVID. And we're continuing those experiments. In many ways, I am hopeful that these experiments and that what happened in COVID naturally will also be, encourage us to continue along the path.

Dani Johnson:
Are you implementing technologies or services or systems that have been helpful in this change?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We're talking about that now. I mean, our workplace services is an amazing team. I mean, they got 99% of us up and running in a relatively short period of time, remotely. We've always been a very global organization and we've been, you know, we've had great technologies for a while and we know how to work remotely together, et cetera, but we were not working virtually, you know, there was maybe 3% of us working virtually from 3 to 99%, in a very short period of time, and they are always experimenting with new technologies and I've just been in touch with them because also in the manager development space, for example, which is one of the areas that I work on, it's very connected to this ‘Project Reimagine’ that I was mentioning. And so right now we're looking at, you know, coaching apps and tools and how to use AI to do broad, you know, large scale coaching for managers. So that's that absolutely. I mean, we're not doing it yet, but we're certainly looking into it.

Chris Pirie:
I’m really, really interested in this ‘Project Reimagine.’ It sounds like if I've got this right, you're actually going to be very deliberate in thinking about how you move to whatever the next phase is. And then you're going to take the opportunity of this disruption of this year to sort of rethink what you want the work experience to be like. Is that, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but is that what you're saying?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Yeah. That's, that is absolutely correct. So we are looking at how, where we work, how we work, how, you know, what are things going to be like post-COVID when we can all come back to work together? We're certainly not an organization that is saying, ‘Hey, look, we've been so successful working remotely that we're going to let everybody work remotely from now on.’ I think that's not necessarily where we're going, but what I can also say is that we are not going to force people to go into the office. That's for sure. Again, in line with our people-first approach, we want to make sure that anybody who's going into the office is doing it because they really want to be there. But we do have, you know, we are working on figuring out how do we bring teams of people back in safely into the office. But also along those lines, we are looking at how do we turn this into an opportunity to really improve the work environment for everybody and think about, well, how can it add more value to the company and to the work we do?

Chris Pirie:
What do you think are the biggest challenges for talent management and the immediate future?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think that, you know, going back to the discussion that we had at the beginning where we were talking about, well, what is this talent function anyway, it's so broad now. Talent is no longer that subset of people in an organization who have been kind of identified as the elite few or the HiPos, right? You know, this is about our people and this is about enabling all of our people. And so I guess the breath of it and figuring out how do you tackle that I think for me is one of the toughest problems that I'm facing is there's so many, it's such a big area, right? How do you make choices about what you're going to focus on and who you're going to focus on when it's really more about all of your people?

Chris Pirie:
It makes me think a little bit about some work that Dani did before on the learning side where the sort of shift was, you know, learning used to be the responsibility of one small group, like the learning team. The change that needed to happen is that everybody needed to take accountability and responsibility for it. And the learning organization was not just a department, but it was the entire organization. It sounds like a similar shift going on.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I couldn't agree more. It's great that you bring that up because that's one of the models that I've been promoting now for several years, and that we're really focusing on. I think I mentioned earlier that we've expanded our coaching opportunities as part of wanting to help managers to learn how to be more flexible in how they manage. And our coaches are not just people from the people function. We have built out a coaching capability that is broader than that. And we've invited people who are in the business who are interested in learning how to be coaches and have helped to build their skillsets so that we can offer that. And because there's no way we could ever possibly meet the needs of an organization this size with the number of people who we have.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
So we need to be super smart about how do we scale these things up, right? We need to be super smart about how we scale up and how we operate at scale. And, you know, this isn't, this is another area that I've been very focused on, which I guess, you know, now that I think about, it is a challenge. I didn't think about it that way before, you know, making sure that we have developmental opportunities for so many more people than what we've been able to do in the past, right? And, typically you remember the times where we had a program and we launched it maybe for 15 people. And they said, well, okay, we'll pilot it this year, and next year, maybe we'll double it.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
You can't do that anymore. You've got to scale it up quickly, because especially if you're going to change culture and looking at how things changed so quickly and how much you need to spend time with people, it's so crucial that we're, you know, that we're working on these things at scale. So I think that's one thing. I would also add that another area that I haven't talked about, I'm really excited about how we've tackled it, is this whole performance experience. And I, you know, I've mentioned a couple of times that we're reimagining performance management and we call it ‘Thrive,’ the new performance experience, and we're working with intact teams. So we're not doing broad training across the board to try to convince people to do something different. What we're doing is we started, we're using agile. Like that's what we're doing.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
We're experimenting. We invited teams to come and join us, intact teams. We have advisors who are aligned to those teams and who are responsible for them. And we've worked with those teams as we're implementing the different phases or the different elements of ‘Thrive.’ And it's really all about helping them to improve the performance of their people. And we work with the managers, we work with the people, we do development with them, but we all do it in these experimenting groups and with intact teams as a way of helping to get specific and granular and help people to think about it within the context of their work. And then we have a group of advisors, and then we have these, what we call ‘Thrive Partners,’ who are also extended people who we've also trained up to help managers on a larger scale.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Because you know, we now have about 2000 people who are experimenting and which is much greater than the five or six people who are working on this. So it's all about scale and how do you tap into the energy of the population to help each other. And by the way, along those lines of tapping into energy, I want to just add something else that I've been thinking a lot about is that there are always people in the organization who love working on people topics. And, you know, and I can remember times maybe a decade ago or more where, you know, where we were telling people, you can't do that. That's the last message I give people. I'm so happy to be able to tap into that energy now, right? And to figure out how to let them run with it, how to give them the tools and the capabilities so that they can bring this further into their organization. For me, that's where it's at. It's not in formal classroom training anymore. I don't really like to do that.

Dani Johnson:
Amen.

Chris Pirie: Amen. Amen, indeed.

Dani Johnson:
Our next question was going to be to ask you for advice. And I think you've given us some really good advice. The first one is, think scale always, and then tap into pockets of energy that already exist and leverage the people on the ground. Are there other bits of advice that you would give to talent leaders regarding sort of aligning to purpose?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think you have to work at it every day. You can't get complacent. So as I was thinking about this idea and our discussion today, it reminded me of a book by a man named Steven Mandis. Steven Mandis was at Goldman Sachs and wrote a book about his experience. And he then used the term organizational drift. And that really stuck with me, this organizational drift concept of how you can move away from your purpose and your core values without knowing it. And I guess any advice that I would give is that you really have to work at this every day. You just can't get complacent or you risk organizational drift.

Chris Pirie:
We always ask a question on the podcast, and we always have, even before we got the purpose bug, why do you choose to do the work that you do, Rachel?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
I think it's a mixture of happenstance and intention here. Here's a story about when I first started my doctoral studies in 2013, the first class that I took was a class on writing your life history. And the idea behind writing your life history, doing this narrative, is that after you've written it, you analyze it. And you understand the points along the line of your life, that where there was something, an event or something meaningful, or some kind of a change that helped you to learn and grow. And as an adult, you know, aspiring adult educator at the time, or I guess I was already an adult educator, but an aspiring scholar practitioner, educator, the idea is to understand what motivates people to learn and what are the points along which, you know, you grow and develop.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And so you start with yourself. You know, I started with this: when I grew up, I was a musician. I had never any intention to become a learning and development professional, or somebody in the leadership and talent space. I started playing the cello when I was six, and I thought I was going to be a cellist for the rest of my life. And I, ultimately I went to school, I got a master's degree in music. And then I went to Europe to play, and I became a professional cellist. And so I was writing about this, and then there was a shift, and I won't go into that because that's way too long. And it requires, you know, an evening together, a post-COVID evening together.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
But what happened was that I started talking about the shift that I made into the learning and development space. And I did that sort of via music. And as I was going through and looking at this timeline and looking at my narrative and reading through it again and again, I realized that actually I was coming back to something that was always very important to me, and that it was, this was a very natural thing for me to do, even though it felt at the time, it felt so foreign because both of my parents have advanced degrees and education was such a deep core value in my family. And I think my children also suffered from it being such a core value. It's too bad I didn't do my doctorate before they were teenagers, because I ultimately learned how that value drove, you know, many of the things that I expected of them, which, you know, maybe wasn't as fair as it should, you know, as I wanted it to be later on. But ultimately being an educator and coming back into the learning and development space was very much aligned to who I am as a person.

Chris Pirie:
Lovely story. How does your musical background play into—that's a really bad pun. I'm going to change that. How does your musical background influence, what, how you do your work or does it at all? Is there, are there any connections there?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
It absolutely does. Everything I do is like a musical composition. When I design a program, it's almost like I can hear it in my head. I can hear how it starts. I hear how it evolves, and I hear how it ends. And so, you know, when I think about a learning experience over, let's say at 18 months with a group of executives, it's like, I was never a composer, but I was always an interpreter of other's compositions, but I'm, it's the idea of how do you interpret, you know, you can hear, you could even go back to purpose, right? How do you interpret the goals of the company and translate that into something, into an experience for, you know, for our people?

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And for me, there's something musical about that. How I write whenever I have to write something, I hear the intonation, I speak it. I don't just write it. I have to read it. I have to hear the intonation. I have to hear the rhythm and feel the rhythm of it. So it's very much, and I also would say just one, one final thought on that is that I've never been somebody who's good at conforming. And I think, yeah, I know you're laughing because you both know that, right, about me. And I think that, you know, that comes also from the spirit of being a musician. And you have, you just have to have courage to be able to get up there and play in front of, I don't know, 500 or a thousand people.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
And you have to have something to say, you can't do it if you don't, right? And then there's also the perfectionism in me because, you know, being an artist as an, you know, help with respect to perfectionism, because you actually want to be able to play every, every note you're supposed to, right? And especially when you get up in front of so many people. So that's another thing, I guess that's sort of more on the negative side, you know, the desire to have everything perfect.

Chris Pirie:
I was going to call you on this. So there's a lot of deliberate practice and hard work that goes into it.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Chris Pirie:
Rachel, thank you so much for your time today and your insights on leading talent in a purpose-aligned organization. And it sounds like a, it's an ongoing experiment for you, and please come back and share with us how things go at some point in the future.

Dr. Rachel Fichter:
Sure. Yeah, it's, it's so much fun to be able to speak with you both.

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TRANSCRIPT

Chris Pirie:
You're listening to learning is the new working podcast by the learning futures group, about the future of work, and the people helping us get there.

Chris Pirie:
Dani, I'm going to put you on the spot first. What's the two or three things that you took away from this morning's conversation that helped you think a little bit differently about purpose?

Dani Johnson :
Yeah, I think one of the things that really struck me is there seems to be a passion surrounding purpose. So these organizations that have a purpose and make decisions based on the purpose tend to have a real passion for what they're doing. And I think that probably hit me harder than it has in the past. I also loved his idea of calling their mission statement or their purpose a constitution. So instead of just sticking it on the wall and hoping somebody reads it as they pass it in the break room, you actually use it to make decisions. They actually bring it up in really hard discussions and say, this is what we're setting forth to do. Here's how we need to make this decision based on that.

Chris Pirie:
I agree. It was really interesting to hear him talk about them sort of referring back to that in real time decision-making, especially during this sort of tumultuous year that we have. He said it was written on important papers which I really liked that image.

Dani Johnson :
Yeah. The other thing that I really like about his organization, and I mentioned this in the podcast, I heard about Medtronic really early on in my career because of these meetings that they have every year where they invite in the people whose lives they have affected. So the doctors and the patients and community and the workers, everybody gets together and sort of, you know, takes a moment to absorb that purpose and realize it and remind themselves why they're doing what they do.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. Stacia, takeaways for you?

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Building on the few things that you all just said, one of them was his point about how they were all stewards of the mission. He talked about how the oldest or the most tenured employee had been there for 41 years, but the mission had been written even before that person and how no one there had been around. And so they were all just stewards of this concept really. And that really struck with me. We mentioned this in the first podcast. I've done some reading on the history of organizations who have tried to be, you know, do well by doing good. And it seems like those who are the most sustaining give a lot of thought to what's written down and what the governance will be around purpose. And so to hear Jeff say that and to hear how alive and well it is right now really struck me.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I think one thing that I'm learning through all these conversations is purpose is a very sort of personal thing. And there's this interplay between the organizational purpose and individual people's purpose. And one of our interviewers that we'll hear from later talks about purpose can occur in pockets across the organization, but this was a company that clearly sort of foundationally at its roots had a clear sense of purpose. And I think you know, that's maybe a factor of its early evolution and maybe it's a factor of the kind of work that they do as well. But it seemed very, very much built into the framework.

Stacia Garr:
The other thing I took away was the importance of ceremony. You mentioned Dani, you know, that basically what is a ceremony? A bringing together of people to talk about the impact of the company. Jeff also mentioned that the two-pound, you know, medal, you know, it's a lot about ceremony, rite of passage, honoring the work that they do, the purpose they do, and really why they gathered together. And that just struck me as incredibly meaningful. I've done a lot of research on recognition and in recognition is I think a part of that for sure, but this literally, I think is ceremony to reinforce purpose. And that to me was meaningful and beautiful.

Chris Pirie:
I love that too. He used the phrase symbolism and ritual, and I actually think, you know, one of the purposes of this podcast series for me is to try and get takeaways, try to get actionable things that people can use to sort of get better in their practice. And I think it's very difficult for a head of L&D or a head of talent to go write a constitution for their organization. That's something that just takes history and time. But I do think these rituals and symbols, that's something that really can be worked on. And I think L&D in particular has an important role to play in creating the space and time for those kinds of rituals to happen.

Chris Pirie:
I also liked the whole frame in that Jeff was relatively new to the company. He heard about it in his interview, in his recruitment process. It was made very explicit to him the purpose and yet, you know, he didn't quite fully believe it and he's been, how surprised he was at how deeply, kind of entwined it is. So I think it was useful to talk to somebody who's kind of fresh into this into this particular company because they have a nice broad perspective and he was very genuine in his kind of learnings around it.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. What was fascinated me too, Chris, is he's only seven months in, but he knew that history cold. It clearly gets embedded because he could just talk about it. And he talked about it with an incredible amount of just understanding. And so that spoke volumes to me too.

Chris Pirie:
Got it. There were two other quotes that I took away to sort of wrap up my point of view on this. One is you can't fake it, which I think is absolutely the litmus test. I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it. You can't fake it. And the second one, he was talking about a really interesting phrase that one of his leaders used when they did some agile thinking around the crunch that the pandemic created for them. And he used the phrase, ‘Let's do more of that.’ And I think that's a great leadership phrase, right? It's kind of, it really is a positive reinforcement for good behavior. And I'm going to, I made a note of that phrase and I'm going to try to use it more often.

Stacia Garr:
One thing I'd like to add was a quote that he said that just, I literally wrote it down. I only wrote down two or three things because we were so engrossed, but he said the phrase, ‘It's not about them. It's about us.’ And he used that in the context of talking about how purpose and the clear organizational purpose gave anyone the license to raise an issue in a curtain turn, anyone at any level, because it wasn't about them. It wasn't about their standing or where they were in the hierarchy. It was about us as an organization and what we do. And that just was so powerful to me.

Chris Pirie:
Yeah. I'd love to learn more about how Jeff's going to impact the learning and leadership culture there. Very interesting guy, definitely approaching his relatively new job with fresh eyes, but a lot of thoughtful focus. It was a great conversation.

Stacia Garr:
Jeff, thanks so much for your time and for sharing your insights with us all. You're here to talk with us about your current organization, but it wasn't very long ago that we were all together at Deloitte. So obviously we’ve all moved on and it's great to be back together today.

Jeff Orlando:
Sure is. Thanks for inviting me to join your podcast.

Dani Johnson :
We're going to start with some really simple, quick and dirty questions to introduce you and your work practice and your organization, and maybe a little bit of your career history as well. So the first question is where do you live and work and why?

Jeff Orlando:
I live in the Philadelphia area here in the United States, but I really consider myself a global citizen as it relates to my work, both the practice of what we do and our business, at least serving global markets. And here in Philly, I'm here for a lot of reasons. But one reason I enjoy is, you know, Philly is really an underdog city and it's been fun to watch the growth and Renaissance of the city over the last, you know, 10, 15 years and see that, you know, innovation, change, and growth kind of in front of my eyes.

Dani Johnson :
That's great. How long have you been in Philly?

Jeff Orlando:
I've been down here since 2007 and before that was in New York City.

Dani Johnson:
So tell us your job title and how you would describe the work you do.

Jeff Orlando:
So I'm the vice president overseeing global learning and leadership development. And it's a good job. It's a good job. I'm still fresh. I'm seven months into the job here now, but you know, for me it really means how do we create the organizational capability to win in the market, using all the different levers that we pull to do that? It's how do we drive a competitive culture to bring our therapies and products and solutions to more patients around the world, through our people? And asking the big questions about how do we scale leadership and scale learning for really diverse and broad employee population that stands technical development, R&D manufacturing and corporate roles? So it's a pretty broad job with a lot of leverage to pull, to drive the kinds of changes we're trying to hear in the company.

Stacia Garr:
Very cool. Well, can you tell us a little bit more about Medtronic itself and a bit about the business model? And part of the reason for that is, you know, we're going to be talking about purpose and how do you drive purpose throughout the business? So giving folks some context on the business model would be helpful.

Jeff Orlando:
I mean, Medtronic's in the medical technology space and really is the leader in that space and has a very proud history. A lot of technology companies, we were started in a garage about 70 years ago with our founder Earl Bakken, who created the first battery operated pacemaker. And that really laid the foundation for a lot of expertise about engineering and electricity and how we can apply that with different disease states and different therapies to help improve patient's lives. And the business has really grown through organic growth and a lot of inorganic tuck-in acquisition growth over the years to really work on so many different diseases and conditions. And now we're at the point where we're serving over 70 million patients per year with our therapies. And the business model is really one that relies on, you know, intensive engineering knowledge and medical knowledge of these different disease states. A good understanding of patient needs, providers and physician needs, and then going out and not just responding to markets, but developing and creating all new markets around the world for these products. So it's a fascinating and diverse business.

Stacia Garr:
Most definitely. It sounds like it, and you alluded just a few moments ago to a range of different types of employees. So can you talk a little bit about the talent landscape in your organization and different populations, job roles, demographic changes, et cetera?

Jeff Orlando:
Sure, sure. We like most companies, you know, we're rapidly becoming, you know, more and more filled with the Millennial and GenZ talent. And for us, you know, we have a specific emphasis on our early career talent, you know, finding the right people from a university or early career venue, bringing them into the company and really having that be a lot of the way we drive innovation here. But that's obviously just one part of it. The core of our business is really our technical expertise and in R&D. If you visit our center, our operational headquarters in Minnesota, you'll walk in and see glass paint walls with people doing lots of things that I don't know how to do behind those walls. Really experimenting with robotic arms and oscilloscopes, pushing forward our innovation and the same time, we have a really significant global manufacturing footprint.

Jeff Orlando:
Some of those are large, more plant-based factories where we're producing some of our products. I mean, we've done a lot of work around ventilators of late due to COVID, but some of those are smaller, very precise almost tailor-made facilities as well, that are working on some of our very complex products. And then add onto that our corporate population, some of whom sit in a big center, some of whom sit in sales roles, some of whom sit remote. We really have it all in terms of a variety of our talent population and how and where they do their work.

Dani Johnson:
So it kind of sounds like you're not busy at all, Jeff.

Jeff Orlando:
(laughs) Yeah, got a few things to do.

Dani Johnson:
Let's talk a little bit about your purpose. Does your organization have an explicit purpose statement? And if so, what is it?

Jeff Orlando:
Oh, we do. Medtronic has a mission and the mission was written really towards the founding of the company. And it was built to serve as the guiding light for the company over its complete history. And, you know, coming into organizations, some organizations have a set of organizational values. Some organizations have a set of aspirations, and oftentimes some employees and other organizations aren't totally connected and they can forget what those are, right? They're not part of the day to day, but here, it almost to me feels like the US Constitution. It's something that's been written on very, very important paper, it's revered, all employees know it, and if we were to change it, it would be a massive organizational effort and massive internal debate to make a shift.

Jeff Orlando:
And there's really been only one change to the mission since it was written, you know, 70 years ago. And that one change where we're talking about the personal worth of employees was modified to not just say personal worth of employees, but personal worth of all employees. And that was really to reflect the inclusive culture that we really strive to maintain and support here. But the mission lays out a number of tenets and the number of tenets in that mission speak to how we serve our patients, how we operate together and then how we aim to have a value to society and make a fair profit in the process.

Dani Johnson:
So talk to me a little bit about that. It sounds like your mission statement is pretty deeply connected to the business model and the way that you guys operate. Has there ever been pushback or downsides or maybe conflicts between the business, making-money aspect of it and the alignment of that mission?

Jeff Orlando:
I think what's nice about it is that the tenets of our mission of which there are six right now, and I'll hit them really, really quickly. And then, then answer your question more directly, Dani. The first around contributing to human welfare through alleviating pain, restoring health and extending life, that's the most foundational part that most employees could speak to. The second speaks to really growing in the areas where we have strength, maximum strength around biomedical engineering, the third around quality of our products and honesty and dedication, but the fourth around making a fair profit on our operations to meet our obligations, sustain growth, and reach our goals. So there is not a conflict between a profit motive and a mission motive here, because those are intertwined. We believe the way to create a viable company and to contribute is to have a fair profit through the work. So I think the mission had a lot of foresight in resolving that potential conflict for us.

Dani Johnson:
I really like that. I think we've talked to four or five people. I think you're one of the first that has incorporated that idea of making profits right into the mission statement.

Stacia Garr:We'll talk a little bit later about kind of some of the other aspects of profit and purpose and how that works at Medtronic. But can you talk to us, just kind of stepping back a little bit, about, you mentioned that this constitution as it were, and I love that idea because it's so, so grounding, can you talk about why that was the case? What was the rationale for that? From the very beginning?

Jeff Orlando:
When the mission was written, you know, way back in the day, I think it was written with a lot of foresight, and when look, I'd have to look up for you the size of the company when the mission was written, but I'm guessing it was at or about 1000 employees, and it was really our founder's vision, you know, Earl Bakken, who was a pioneer in this space and, you know, deeply cared about serving patients and deeply cared about the physician relationship as well, right? I think he was witnessing the growth of the company and seeing the opportunity and seeing the potential and felt the need to, at that point in time, make a declarative statement about who we would become and what we would do. So I think it really just comes from that place of establishing a stake in the ground that is immovable and it's something we would all be guided towards.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. We talk about it in the research that it’s the North Star for the organization.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. I think that's right. And, you know, it's in the language here, right? If you see a PowerPoint deck that talks about an organizational strategy, or you see a PowerPoint deck that talks about a market opportunity, 9 out of 10 times, there's going to be a reference in that deck to which of the six tenets of the mission we're connecting to and how we're driving it. And I’ve seen in my limited tenure here so far, especially during COVID where it's been a challenging business environment, right, and we've had to make a lot of choices, I've seen people on Zoom, of course, make explicit references to the mission when we got into a tough spot about a decision. And really lean on it and use it, not in a trite way, not in a cliche way, but in a real way to get everybody to pull back and zoom out and think about the choices we're making. So it's been real. It's been real here that way.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. Because I'd love to know what this really looks and feels like, so in kind of a generic way, could you take us in the room and like share with us, you know, how was the conversation going and how did you use that mission to, or how did that person use that mission to reground the team and refocus on what was?

Jeff Orlando:
I think, you know, oftentimes in any group decision-making process, you know, we all know about some of the risks of those, right? There is a group think risk, there's the risk of being myopic. There's the fear of challenging the loudest voice in the room, all those things that happen in decision-making processes, and you know, people who work on group relations over the years have worked on lots of different ways to help that. I remember in an old role we had paddles and one paddle said, I know I have an idea or let's move on. You know, people would use those as almost psychologically safe hacks to help in those conversations. But you know, where I've seen it used here is to unstick a decision or unstick less, you know, fully embracing thinking. And it's a leveler, right? Anybody at any level in that meeting can make that statement because it's not about them, it's about us and it lets people tap into it and step back. And, you know, you see the on Zoom, you see people, you know, lean back in their home office chairs when someone reminds everybody of what we're doing there in a really respectful and, I think, useful way.

Stacia Garr:
And I love that phrase that you just had. It's not about them. It's about us. It's really that connection to the community and that connection to what we're all trying to achieve together.

Jeff Orlando:

That's right. And I mean, the longest tenured person at Medtronic has been here for 41 years. The mission was written before they started, right? So none of us wrote this. All of us are stewards.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. That's a beautiful imagery, I think. We know that Medtronic was recently included in Fortune Magazine's annual ‘Change the World’ list for things like increasing ventilator production fivefold from pre-pandemic production numbers, also doing things like open sourcing design, which is a huge thing for an R&D company. Also focusing on carbon neutrality and gender and ethnicity pay equity. So clearly this is something you all are living and breathing, as you've mentioned, and have been recognized for doing that. I'd love to know about, you've mentioned several times, you're new-ish to this organization, seven months in. So can you share with us some of your initial impressions when thinking about kind of everything this organization is doing when you think about it from a purpose perspective?

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. I mean, just to hit on those examples that you shared there. And I think the, for a lot of us, the open sourcing of one of our ventilators inside of the heights of COVID was something that all of us took a lot of pride in and, you know, understanding how that decision was made. It was made, I think over a weekend, in a matter of hours, it wasn't something that there was a ton of huge internal debate around, should we do it? I think, you know, we saw that opportunity to help and saw that it was the right choice, the right thing to do, you know, didn't run a bunch of complex financial models around it, right? Leaned on the parts of the mission and said, you know what, this is the right thing to do.

Jeff Orlando:
Let's go ahead and do it. So I think for a lot of us, that was a really nice kind of re-recruitment moment to see the company step up in that way. I mean, and for me, before I even started, I attended well, what's called the employee holiday program. And that's something that happens on an annual basis where, you know, we bring physicians, we bring some of our own experts and we bring patients to our campus in Minneapolis and, you know, imagine the atrium of a big office building filled with thousands of folding chairs with, you know, punch and cookies in the back and, you know, see stories of real impact to these patients' lives and see our own senior leaders have that tear welling up in their eye, listening to the impact of the work. And I mean, for me sitting there in that room, you know, it kind of clicked on how the work we do from a talent perspective, if we get it right. And we let unleashed that discretionary effort, we unleashed that ability to speak up, move forward, our cycle time with better management and better learning. We can get that stuff out the door to more people more quickly and help. And I can just see that value chain in that context. So it's, that's how it felt real to me.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. One of the things that we've been talking about with the research is how purpose can, it gives really in many ways, a reason for an organization to exist, you know, we're in this world with more gig economy with, you know, all these different things that we're doing, but the organization allows us to come together, to be together, and to do more than we can as individuals. And so I think what you're sharing is really kind of the clear articulation of what that looks like and feels like, you know, really why we work in organizations.

Jeff Orlando:
I think that's right. And I think that, you know, our business is one that lends itself to the, you know, altruistic higher calling, right? But every business has a way and has it encapsulating that purpose, and that meaning is really important for people regardless of the business that you're in. For sure.

Dani Johnson:
I remember one of the very first times I heard about Medtronic really, really early on in my career was that very meeting that you were talking about, Jeff, where everybody got together and sort of reaffirmed the reason that they were all there. It's stuck in my mind like nothing else. It's kind of great. Talk to us a little bit about stakeholder relationships. So you mentioned this meeting where patients and doctors and everybody sort of getting together. When we think about purpose, we think about sort of a broader purpose. Obviously, we have responsibilities to our shareholders, but what other stakeholder relationships are important to how you all do business?

Jeff Orlando:
I do think though we think about this and almost that balanced scorecard kind of a way that, you know, we have our, you know, our patients and our physicians, obviously being our primary stakeholders in terms of the value that we create and that's what we're playing. And that's what we're in the game for, right? But I've seen, you know, us as a business take an even bigger voice on societal matters, especially being a Minnesota-based company, Minnesota operationally based company, although we're held outside the US in Ireland, having the conversation and emphasis, you know, as a result of the calls for social justice. So I've seen the company really step up in frankly, bolder ways than I anticipated in a really nice way over the last few months. And I mean that obviously societal lens is one where we're taking a lot of a bigger step, but I've also seen really good relations with the analyst community and the investor community. Today is actually our biannual investor conference. Right before this, I was watching our leaders speak about our pipeline and clinical trial successes. So you've got, I think you'll see here a real nice balance of everybody knows we're in it for the patients, but not just looking at Wall Street as a stakeholder, you know, looking at governments around the world, looking at these broader societal issues as areas where we want play more, we want to have a louder voice.

Dani Johnson:
Very cool.

Stacia Garr:
So can we talk a little bit, you've mentioned a few times, you know, you've seen it click, you've seen the, the talent model click, the importance of the work that you all do, click. Can we talk a little bit more about what that looks like from the HR perspective? So how is HR involved in the purpose-driven aspects of the organization?

Jeff Orlando:
I think what's really interesting about it is HR is not pushing it. Because the mission has been around for so long and because everyone knows about it, HR is not the voice for the mission. Our senior leaders really are the consistent voice for the mission. There's a lot of symbolism around it. So one thing that you know, we think about with companies, right, is what are the rituals and symbols that give that kind of meaning. And there's something here called the ‘Mission Medallion Ceremony’ and every employee within the first couple of years of their tenure receives this heavy two-pound circular medallion and is given that by a senior leader. And just has a bit of a ceremony around reminding everybody what we're doing and why we're doing it. So it's those kinds of institutional things that have been in the water for a long time that continue to happen. And sure, from an HR perspective, we help logistically with some of those things. But those are really business processes that are tied to our senior leadership. There's not, coming from HR, a mission project. There's not a mission task force or a mission leader. It just lives. It is not constructed, governed, and budgeted, I guess is one way to say it.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, that's interesting, this ceremony that you mentioned. One of the things we again talk about in the research is how, in many ways, one of the big shifts that we see overall and in certainly kind of American society is a move away from some of the traditional places that have given us meaning. So most obviously the churches, civic organizations and the like and how a belief that organizations are increasingly giving people a way to fulfill that purpose. And so if you think about, you know, that ceremony in that context, it kind of reaffirms that, you know, this is something that is a in some way, it sounds like a rite of passage at Medtronic, you know, something that is critical to kind of the culture and the sense of purpose and deriving that sense of purpose from being at Medtronic.

Jeff Orlando:
I think that's right. I think, I think your, you know, your observation is spot on about some of those traditional societal institutions and, and I think organizations will need to figure out over time how much do they want to play into that, right? Or live into that.

Dani Johnson:
So you've talked a little bit about how HR does not run the purpose. I kind of love the idea that it's coming from your top leadership, but I'm sure that it does impact the alignment of the talent life cycle on your organization. So your job, how does that purpose alignment affect how you all attract and enable and particularly developed because that's your role and retain folks?

Jeff Orlando:
I think a lot of what we try to do is to translate the mission for the business objectives we have of today. Right? So if the mission is that, like you guys are saying, North Star, right? That we're always looking at and always pointing to that, that's our kind of lofty aspiration. That's what we're shooting for. But, you know, right in front of us, we've got a really challenging, competitive landscape that we're always trying to navigate and figure out. So what we tend to do in HR is say, okay, our mission is the mission, but what kind of tweaks and enhancements to our culture do we need to make, to really drive the kinds of business shifts we're trying to, trying to deliver? What's our talent model need to look like that aligns with our mission, but again, reflects those more near term things? So, so here, you know, our culture and talent levers are more about driving strategy execution and the mission is our ever-present guide. So I think it's a really positive background factor, and it's a way to translate for our people what we're shooting for and what we're trying to do.

Dani Johnson:
Do you ever find yourself sort of at, I mean, and I love the fact that you've mentioned earlier that you actually use your mission statement and your purpose to make decisions, but because you are competing in a fairly tight industry, I'm just wondering, have you ever run across challenges with that purpose alignment to some of the core talent functions?

Jeff Orlando:
I think it can create questions, right? I think when we think about talent development, talent selection, some of those functions, I think at times, people can say, ‘Hey, wait a second. Does this decision align with our intent in our mission?’ Right? And while again, almost always our business leaders, our people leaders are making decisions with that, with those thoughts in minds, like anything written on paper there is interpretation. And people will interpret it in different ways. So, no, we have had scenarios where people say, ‘I don't get it. I don't get how we're making this decision because in our mission, it doesn't explicitly state that, or perhaps it states something else. And there's an implication.’ So, you know, anytime you have these kinds of revered documents, they'll be that risk of misinterpretation. And sometimes it requires a level of explanation, but I mean, from my lens, it's worth it for that trade off because it at least forces that kind of organizational conversation and understanding.

Dani Johnson:
I love that. It also makes the comparison to the Constitution a little bit more poignant as well.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah. Especially today, right?

Stacia Garr:
Let's shift and talk a little bit about the events of 2020. You've alluded to them several times, Jeff, but I want to kind of go directly at that and want to understand how have the events, and so the way that we're thinking about this is, you know, certainly COVID-19, but also the calls for social justice, given that you all are, you know, have a large population in Minneapolis. How have those impacted your all over operations, your overall operations, as well as your work?

Jeff Orlando:
You know, again, just to personalize it, my first week in this role was in the beginning of March. So it was right as everything was really starting to shut down and compress. So, you know, I've certainly lived this as a new person here as well. I mean, from a COVID perspective, you know, that's been, had an, obviously a huge and material impact on our business, in our operations in terms of what the demand has been for our products, where that demand has been around the world particularly on the ventilator business. And we have quintupled, I think that's the right word. Yeah. Five times, quintupled. We've quintupled our production of ventilators to suit some of the demand. And as we discussed previously, you know, open sourced one of our models as well.

Jeff Orlando:
So you saw a lot of really nimble behavior in the company to make those things happen very quickly. And we establish relationships with places like Tesla and Intel to, you know, bring those products to market even more quickly. You know, and our CEO has been, has said, ‘wow, we've been able to produce so quickly and make decisions so quickly in those contexts. You know, let's do even more of that,’ right? As we think about our culture and how to drive with more speed and decisiveness in the company. And then on the calls for social justice side, I believe we have about 12,000 people out of our 90,000 employee-base located in the state of Minnesota. So, you know, some of those people knew George Floyd personally. So the, you know, the impact on that to, you know, our employee population, you know, definitely, you know, really, really, really high.

Jeff Orlando:
And I think the company just leaned into it, leaned into it. I was really gratified and almost surprised to see, you know, a series of open-air conversations, we called them, happen on a Zoom platform where we brought in clinical psychologists of color to meet with, you know, some folks from our African descent community in a series of interactions. And I was able to attend, you know, one of those sessions as an observer and to see people demonstrate that level of vulnerability over a computer screen and a camera really challenged some of my assumptions about what's possible virtually, but also demonstrated just a really nice level of trust in the company to have those conversations. So you've seen a really nice amount of leaning in there. And then, you know, that's been backed up with some sizable commitments towards institutions that serve the African descent population. And also we have a new relationship with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. So lots of good mix of, you know, supporting the emotional needs of our people, but also some, you know, credible and sizable commitments to really make a shift. It's hit this company in a big way, for sure.

Chris Pirie:
Do you mind if I ask a question right now? Can I just ask?

Stacia Garr:Yes, please, Chris.

Chris Pirie:
Sorry, guys. I mean, that's an amazing story, Jeff. And one of the things that I'm hearing a lot about is how this sort of Zoom work-life that we've all been forced into sort of strips away a little bit of humanity and it's that much harder to connect with people on an emotional level. And I know a lot of the L&D teams that I'm talking to are sort of actively trying to find ways to put sort of humanity back into digital learning to sort of use a catch phrase, but it seems like you went through a pretty powerful experience there. How do you feel about putting the humanity back into digital learning? Was that, did that prompt any thoughts or changes in strategy for you?

Jeff Orlando:
I think it just opened us up to the possibility. Even our, you know, like most major companies, you know, we've had to convert all of our in-person learning programs to virtual programs. And, you know, if you look at our net promoter score or our satisfaction scores, which admittedly are only one way to measure learning, but it's a near-term measure, right? Yeah. And if you look at our scores in virtual settings compared to our scores in physical settings, they are virtually the same. I don't know if that would have been the same prior to COVID or, and the shutdowns or not, but it's, you know, certainly reassuring that we can create that level of value with these platforms. And I do think that, you know, to the point on being vulnerable or being open and ready, I've seen that happen at all levels of our company in these formats. And I think it's just we're social creatures, right? We're resilient, adaptable, social creatures, and a lot of our venues are closed to us for now. And it's going to come out somewhere if we can facilitate it correctly. I think it can even come out online.

Stacia Garr:
I'd like to build on that a little bit, Jeff. We're doing some research on managers and manager behavior, particularly during the pandemic. And one of the themes we've hit on is that we're asking managers to do a lot more, you know, you mentioned that, the facilitating the conversations about social justice, you know, obviously, particularly right after the pandemic and everybody went to working from home, you know, we're asking them to check on kind of psychological safety and do they have the right workspace and all these things that we haven't been asking them to do in the past. And so I'm wondering if in particularly also keeping in mind purpose here, but I'm wondering if you all have been shifting the way you've been thinking about supporting managers during this time and, you know, maybe piggybacking a little bit off the last question, you know, if you see that shift potentially having a long-term impact.

Jeff Orlando:
Yeah, I think there has been some shift. It’s something I've learned in this time too. And so for a lot of what we've done is to say, ‘how do we empower and inspire managers to bring out the best of their people?’ And give managers, you know, a significant amount of autonomy to make decisions for their teams and drive innovation and drive success. And for strategic topics and long-term company growth, that's all the right stuff, right? But as it comes to some of these more challenging topics like COVID, social justice, et cetera, managers have been appreciating clear, simple direction. And that's been a change in our approach for how we communicate and equip our managers around these things. So, you know, the sections in these documents that might've been, you know, considerations or thought starters, those have been replaced with, ‘here's what to do and what not to do.’ Just because everybody is so overloaded with so much right now that it's been appreciated to get that level of direction from trusted sources. So I think it's that mix of empower the manager, inspire the manager on those topics, but when it comes to some of these really challenging matters that people have never held floor as a manager, it's about direction and clarity.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. We've also talked in that research a lot about just what you mentioned, specific language, you know. I know as a parent, sometimes I need to read a book that says, ‘Say this thing to your kid, don't say that.’ You know, before I had kids, I was like, what are you talking about? I'm going to know what to say, and that is not the case. And it's kind of similar with this. When you're in a new situation, you don't have a history of knowing how to respond and you're faced with what is a highly emotional, for many, a highly emotional moment. Just having those words to hand, I think can be really helpful.

Jeff Orlando:
Yep. it wasn't us, but there was another company who sent all their managers a stack of cards, like playing cards with different phrases to start conversations on some of these topics. I thought that was brilliant.

Dani Johnson:
Let's move on a little bit to sort of the future of talent management. What do you, Jeff, in all of your vast experience, what do you think are the toughest problems facing talent management in the immediate future?

Jeff Orlando:
I think probably the toughest one is taking advantage of all the data out there. And it's in so many ways, right? It's data about an individual, you know, think about some of the assessments and psychometrics and employee history data we have that we could potentially use in a better way. I think it's about predicting future skills and future jobs and being ahead of that, preparing for it, and then pulling that all into a package that people who are on the front lines of figuring that out can use and actually apply. So the creating the real kind of objective set of data and to guide decisions around talent management, that has to be one of the hardest ones. And, you know, we're seeing HR as a field really, really grow that predictive analytics and AI muscle but how you take that, bring that into all parts of the HR value chain and help our business leaders understand it that for sure that for sure it would be one.

Jeff Orlando:
And then I think the second one on talent management would just be continuing to work on the inclusion and diversity objectives, particularly around helping to change people's minds about what's needed for success in a role. Right? A lot of people tend to believe that there's a formula or there's one way to succeed. Or if, you know, certain individual doesn't have the same set of experiences as them, they may have an experience gap and, you know, this is across all companies and how you really help people think more broadly about who's ready and what does readiness mean? That's another, another hard one.

Dani Johnson:
I really liked that. And I actually like how those two things fit together. I think over the past five years, we've talked so much about data and technology that sometimes we think it's dehumanizing in nature, but if we use it right, which is the job of HR and talent management, if we use it right, it can be incredibly enlightening to the organization, but also really empowering to the individuals. I love those two things together.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think adding to that, the ability to use that data and extrapolate from it, you know, Dani and I, for instance, have seen some technologies that will say, you know, Hey, we know that that these people will say they have these skills, but we also knew that people who have been in similar roles also have these other skills. So you might want to make the assumption that they do or at least ask if they do which, you know, for in diverse individuals are less likely to share kind of skills that may not be fully baked. And so, you know, you can see how data in that instance could actually, you know, in this example, open the talent pipeline much, much wider, bring in more people who we wouldn't have considered in the past. And so, you know, it's, I think, about making those intentional choices with the data that open the aperture of understanding as opposed to limiting it. And I think we're starting to see more of that.

Jeff Orlando:
That's great.

Stacia Garr:
Jeff, one question we wanted to ask you is, you know, you were working at this incredibly purpose-filled organization, and as you think about talent leaders who are maybe in other organizations, maybe not quite as purpose-filled, what kind of advice would you give to them? What are the things that you think they could do to help infuse purpose into their daily practice and to the talent practices that they're putting in place?

Jeff Orlando:
I think you can't fake it. I think it can't be plastic. It can't be a veneer, it needs to be real. You know, true, we're a business that lends itself to altruism and purpose. But I think as a process of discovery, figuring out in any business, what's the real reason for existing, and not telling some lofty story that is beyond the truth. Instead, it's just, articulate the truth and get people excited about the work of that company. I mean, employees these days, I think all of us are so able to sniff out hypocrisy or sniff out overstatement. So how can it just reflect the truth and build excitement around the truth? Don't create excitement around something that is a little bit perhaps disingenuous. That'd be my top tip.

Dani Johnson:
I love that. Speaking of ingenuous this is a question that Chris asks at the end of all of his podcasts and I love it. Why did you choose this line of work and what inspired you to do the work that you do? So for instance, a person or an incident or an observation or something, how did you get into this line of work?

Jeff Orlando:
Oh man. Wow. I mean, I've been in this game. I mean, I remember you know, being in college and I was interested in psychology and I was interested in business and I'm like, well, I can glue those two together and do this work, but I guess that's kind of a tactical, I don't know. I think I've always been just confused and fascinated by how groups work together, how people interact, and how it can be so predictable, but then people will surprise you, how external events can impact groups of people. And it's just been something I've just always had a curiosity about. And maybe it's me trying to figure it out for myself too. But it's just been a fascination and it's something that, for me that, you know, I'm just as curious about this stuff today as I was when I started, which, you know, I take it as a real gift.

Dani Johnson :
I love that. We hear the word curious when we ask that question a lot. One final question before you wrap up, where can people learn about your work and how can people connect with you and your company?

Jeff Orlando:
We'd love to connect with you. Take, I think, you know, followingour social channels on LinkedIn, it's probably a great way to stay in touch on Medtronic where we've really amped up our social media efforts and do some really interesting stuff in there. And, you know, that's another good spot to connect with me as well.

Stacia Garr:
Great. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the time today and for just incredibly thoughtful conversation.

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TRANSCRIPT

Aaron Hurst:
This is Aaron Hurst, founder and CEO of Imperative. And I'm talking today on September 23, 2020.

Chris Pirie:
Aaron, welcome to ‘Learning Is the New Working.’ This is the first of our multi-interviewer sessions, so I'm really fingers crossed that this is going to work. We’re kicking off a brand-new series on the topic of purpose and what that means to people who are HR practitioners and talent leaders in organizations. And I can't think of a better person to sort of like frame up the landscape of purpose for us. So we really appreciate your time.

Aaron Hurst:
I'm really excited to be here and I love the whole premise of your show.

Chris Pirie
Great. Well, Stacia is going to kick us off with some introductory questions to help sketch out your practice and your impact on the world. So I'll hand over to Stacia.

Stacia Garr:
Thanks, Chris. And hi, Aaron, thanks so much for joining us today. Let's start off with what part of the world do you live in and work in and why?

Aaron Hurst:
So I've been pretty nomadic throughout my career, but I am currently living in Seattle, Washington. We moved here about six years ago when my wife was recruited to be the chief sustainability officer at Amazon, which was her dream job and we moved from Brooklyn to Seattle, with the kids.

Chris Pirie:
Yay, Seattle.

Stacia Garr:
And tell us, what's your current job title and how would you describe the work you do?

Aaron Hurst:
Yeah, so I am an entrepreneur, a social entrepreneur. I am currently founder and CEO of imperative, which is a venture-backed tech company that's really focused on helping people really show up with purpose in their day to day jobs using the latest research in neuroscience and psychology.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. And that's a very cool technology, both Dani and I have had a chance to see it. So folks out there should definitely check it out. I think today we're going to talk quite a bit about the organization that you were part of before that, which was Taproot. So can you talk about the Taproot Foundation and your role in it today?

Aaron Hurst:
I started off my career in the nonprofit sector and got quickly frustrated by the lack of resources and capacity that nonprofits had: they have these great visions, great dreams, but they weren't able to often achieve them. So I went and spent five years working in Silicon Valley in the nineties and really started to understand how you scale an organization. And it occurred to me that if we could get business professionals say marketing, tech, HR, finance, et cetera to do what lawyers do and to donate their time and their talent on a pro bono basis to nonprofits, we could actually help the nonprofit sector step up to the challenges in the world. So I started that in 2001 with early investment from Bill Draper the godfather of venture capital in the Valley. And we scaled it up to seven cities across the country and then worked with the White House to create a campaign, to get CEOs, to really pledge pro bono work, not just volunteering and philanthropy, but actually enabling their employees to what we said, give what, you know and make their work matter.

Aaron Hurst:
And then we partnered with BMW Foundation which was an incredible partnership to create a network of social entrepreneurs in 30 different countries that were building similar programs and for us all to help lift each other up. So it was this incredible experience and really working with the best of every sector across the country, around the world. And I just looked back at that and just feel so blessed to have like, had the idea at the right moment with the right people to do something that really, I feel like touched a lot of lives.

Stacia Garr:
Definitely. And actually I'm one of the lives that you touched. I don't know if you know this, but when I first moved out to the Bay Area in 2009, in the heart of the recession and found myself with—moved out where I didn't have a job, we came out for my husband to do some graduate work at Stanford. And I was, you know, trying to figure out what I was going to do next and, and to find a bit of my purpose. And so I, I started volunteering with Taproot and did a couple of different projects using my HR expertise and expanded my, my marketing expertise to it. So I'm thankful for that opportunity to, to give back that you helped create.

Aaron Hurst:
No, it's awesome. And it's just, it is so powerful when you see that your, the skills that you think of as being commercial actually are broader than that and that you can use them to really make a difference in a lot of different ways.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned it just a few moments ago, but can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing today and the role of purpose within it?

Aaron Hurst:
Yeah, absolutely. So I guess the best way to tell that story is just to quickly share sort of why I left the Taproot Foundation. So what we saw with the people who were volunteering for Taproot when we did our research, we found that the main reason people did pro bono work was because their work wasn't fulfilling enough for them. And I like to sort of describe it as like we were providing a vitamin to make up for the fact that people's sort of core entrees or core sources of food were not providing the nutrition that they needed. And, you know, I realized that it's a great marketing insight for attracting volunteers, but it actually pointed to an incredible problem in our society. And decided I really wanted to focus my energy on how do we figure out how to make all work meaningful?

Aaron Hurst:
How do we help people bring purpose to their work? So left and started Imperative and was on a journey of just research to figure out how can I take the insights from Taproot? How can I work with, you know, leading universities like Michigan and NYU? How can I work with leading companies to really crack this nut? And we started off, you know, early on with an insight, which was that if people don't know what their purpose is, they're very unlikely to be fulfilled at work because they're basically driving blind. And they're basically reacting to the world as it comes to them. So we were able to take sort of individual purpose and we were able to decode that and figure out psychologically what predicts that. So if you create the first ever assessment that enabled people to understand, at least at a high level of what brings meaning to their work, what their purpose is. And from that, you know, we started working with dozens of companies, government agencies doing that work, but we realized that to actually make a difference in people's lives, we had to find a way to systemically integrate that into you know, their, their day-to-day work.

Aaron Hurst:
It's not enough just to have this sort of moment of clarity. You have to actually change that. I think it's very similar as we talk about companies like just to finding a purpose is not enough. It's about how do you live it. And what we uncovered in our research, and we spent years and millions of dollars doing the research was that it was actually the act of regular time set aside for reflection of going and saying like, how am I intentionally showing up? How can I bring my purpose to the forefront? Combined with peer support that really was creating that lasting change in people's work. So what we've built is the first ever pure coaching platform that connects people based on their purpose profiles for ongoing conversations that we script based on what we understand the psychology of behavior change. So that every two weeks you have a one-hour conversation, you do five of these over the course of a quarter, and then you switch partners. So it's a way for people to bring purpose to their work and to also break down a lot of these barriers around social isolation and people just fundamentally feeling lonely in their lives by creating real relationships. And we're now deploying this, you know, as of this year with COVID at many companies and to seeing it's really changing people's work and changing their lives.

Chris Pirie:
You're the first in the series and we were deliberate in asking you to come on early and kind of sketch out some of the, sort of the essentials of purpose and the landscape, so to speak. In 2013 you wrote, I think it's 2013, you wrote a book called The Purpose Economy. It's a really interesting book. I think you wrote it in an interesting way. What prompted you to write the book? What were you seeing that was going on sort of at a macro level that caused you to write the book?

Aaron Hurst:
Yeah, so it was a couple of things. One is my uncle was a as an economist and entrepreneur and his thesis at Stanford when he got his PhD coined the term information economy and sort of laid out in the late seventies for the first time, sort of this idea that we'd moved from an industrial into, to an information age and information economy. It was sort of the early days of people realizing that. And, you know, he was looking at the invention of cable TV. He was looking at how media was changing and how that was basically gonna surpass industrial the industrial economy as a main source of value creation in society, which obviously became true. And this were looked at what he had seen at the time and looked around me, you know, sitting at the Taproot Foundation, seeing all these companies starting to change the way they were thinking about their workforce, how they're thinking about products seeing how the next generations were thinking about the world in very different ways.

Aaron Hurst:
It occurred to me that maybe we're at the start of this next era, sort of the post information economy, era, where purpose is going to be, what's going to be creating value for people as employees and as consumers and the company is going to be able to thrive from a recruiting standpoint and from an actual revenue standpoint or the ones that are gonna be able to harness that. And I think another way to think about this, and it's really evolved for me since 2013 and it's, it's the purpose economy, but in many ways it's the psychology economy. I think what we've seen is just industry has invested heavily in understanding the psychology of human beings and applying that to, you know, their workforce to their technology and realizing that there is this incredible need beyond just sort of feeding people and shelter et cetera, to actually solve for psychological needs, which is why we've seen things like Facebook emerge, where you're basically selling, and the innovation is around psychological manipulation in that case. But it's around the same sort of fundamental a bunch of innovation that's, it is really sort of tied into psychology. And the, sort of the understanding we've, that's emerged in the last 10 years around us for how we work as human beings.

Chris Pirie:
And can you sort of crystallize a definition of purpose economy for us and then perhaps talk about some examples or types of organizations?

Aaron Hurst:
Absolutely. So I think there's a couple of things to sort of crisply define it. I think the first thing is it's not like a sub economy the way I'm defined as it's the fourth economy in history. So agrarian, industrial, information, and then purpose economy. So it sort of ties to a whole era, not a niche of the economy. And this definition is that it's an, it's a new economic era where the creation of meaning for people as employees and consumers drives market demand and innovation.

Chris Pirie:
And talk about types – I think if I get a little bit tripped up on, you know, for example, they're a charitable organization, Dani and I did some work with the international Red Cross, and then there are, then there are sort of causal organizations that are, that support a particular cause. Are they a subset this, is there a sort of architecture I can think on purpose?

Aaron Hurst:
So it's an interesting, it's an interesting question. So I think there's two different sort of camps of purpose. I think there's the purpose that's been defined largely out of the nonprofit sector. It's been largely defined by the marketing world. And then I think there's a second piece, which really comes out of research in psychology and I'm much more in that latter camp. So I think the first camp you're looking at things where it's really is cause related and it's about identifying a cause and selling a cause of working for a cause. And I think the research shows that there is benefit there, but there are a tremendous number of people. For example, working in NGOs that are caused driven that are very unfulfilled and don't find their work terribly meaningful. For example, and there are people working in companies that you wouldn't associate a cause with who are finding deep meaning in the work.

Aaron Hurst:
So this sort of superficiality, just being able to stamp a cause on something is not really what I would say is beyond sort of that baseline superficial level. I think it has a lot more to do with actually the culture of an organization and the way in which that organization or departments in that organization make decisions about what they're building and selling and whether or not they're doing that in alignment with their values alignment with stakeholders and looking at sort of the totality of the impact of something. And then as an employer really looking at not just how do we engage our employees, but how do we actually ensure our employees are fulfilled? How do we meet their needs for strong relationships for impact for growth. And I think that's where you see like a much stronger psychological definition around this work that I think we can build on.

Aaron Hurst:
That's not just that sort of cause-related overlay. So I think the other thing I would say here is that in my experience, there's very few companies that I would say are like purpose driven or purpose companies. I tend to find it's more like a manager or a department or a product. And in a lot of these bigger companies, there's so much diversity. I mean, my wife works at Amazon and I think there's leaders there who are purpose driven and there's those that aren't, there are products that are there products that aren't, it's like too big to be able to say, like carte blanche this is a, a purpose, you know, purpose-driven organization. It really does come down to the sort of more human scale groups, if you will.

Chris Pirie:
What I wanted to go to next, and this is kind of very relevant. I like the idea that that sort of happens in pockets even in large organizations. But I want to talk about why you think business leaders have embraced this concept so much.

Aaron Hurst:
There's a couple of things. I think one is just on a personal level. I mean, I've interviewed a lot of these CEOs and they truly want their business to be about more than just sort of a legacy of money and for capital creation. They see all the problems in the world and they do like authentically wants to be part of that, but they can't do that on their own often. There's so many pressures around short term thinking and arounds for what a business should be. And it often takes just an extra dose of courage for a CEO to be able to make that leap and to be able to convince their investors, their board, et cetera, to make that, that leap to be truly like an ethical purpose driven, you know, mindset as a leader. And I think what the Business Roundtable did, which I thought was just fantastic, was it took away a lot of that risk. It basically allowed a lot of these people to come out of the closet as purpose-driven leaders who like wanted to be this way, but needed to have that group to create safety to make that statement. So I don't have a cynical point of view that I think very authentically comes from leaders, wanting their organizations to be this way and just not wanting to be out on their own doing that. Not just cause it's sort of marketing wise scary, but also I think most of us don't know how to do it yet. So the idea that they're all in it together learning, I think also creates some safety there. And then I think there's a market pressure, right. Which I think we all read about all the time, which is, you know, employees are demanding this you know, talent overall there's, you know, ups and downs, but overall right now talent market is incredibly tight.

Aaron Hurst:
And the power is in people, especially in knowledge workers, you know, software developers, et cetera, and being able to be the employer that you know, where they want to work. And there's also with, you know, social media and with the complexity now of marketing it's really hard to stand out in the marketplace if you don't have a message that aligns with the values of what people are doing and where you're not building products that are designed with psychology in mind to have people have them meet a need that keeps them loyal to your brand and loyalty your product. So there's a very strong personal case for it, for these leaders and then a very strong market case for this. And at this point, I think it has crossed that chasm where to say that you're not this way, like stands out more than saying that you are, which I think is sort of that tipping point. I think overall to say that we are now in a purpose economy.

Stacia Garr:
Aaron, I'd like to jump in here to build on that. So if, I mean, obviously the economy has gone through an interesting period here in the last few months. And, and so if that balanced tips, if we see, you know, we've seen a number of organizations starting to lay off workers if that really tips, do you think that that's going to have a hit on this vision of the purpose economy, if, if we're not in such a tight talent market.

Aaron Hurst:
I think short term, but I think longer term you know, these things go up and down and I think the cat is out of the bag in terms of people now understanding more about psychology and share more about their needs for being empowered with that message. I look at my kids and what they're being taught in the school right now, which is really around this sort of purpose first mindset towards works. I think it's gonna be really hard to go sort of backwards on this. We can see you know, a blip there. And I think it's also to look at the looking at what, where we are right now in context. I, a lot of the problems in the world right now are actually because of purpose. And I really like to point out like purpose isn’t just like only good thing, this only sort of positive force, purpose is why we want to be part of tribes. That's why we want to be feeling like a connection to community. And that's creating a lot of the political problems that we have right now. People want to be part of something bigger than themselves and something bigger than yourself can be positive or negative. So I think a lot of these forces also just, they're not all positive. I think we have to understand that purpose and psychology is sort of being used to do good and to do something completely other.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And one of the things we talked about in the report that I think is a shift too, is we have historically derived a lot of our purpose outside of work. So if you think about maybe in our, our communities or our churches and other institutions, and as some of those institutions have become maybe less prevalent in some people's lives, a lot of people are looking to their work to get that sense of purpose. So I think we've seen a permanent shift in terms of how people are thinking about purpose.

Aaron Hurst:
That's absolutely right. And we actually did a study with PWC last year. We looked at how fulfilled people were at work and how fulfilled they were in their lives overall. And we found that people who said they were fulfilled in their lives. So it's like overall, like I am fulfilled I'm in totality. Only 1% of those people said they weren't fulfilled at work. So I think not only is it that, you know, maybe faith and institutions and some of these community organizations are shrinking, I think it's also a recognition in research and psychology that we're one human being and we have a single mindset and a single approach to life. And that's the whole idea of like working, just be working, you're going to meet the needs for fulfillment outside of work. Look, statistically does not be a common occurrence at all.

Chris Pirie:
This is a cue to go and dive into the implications for HR. I think Dani is going to take the lead on some questions around that. Are you good to go, Dani?

Dani Johnson:
Yeah, I am. I think this has been a really interesting conversation so far. Aaron, I think you’re much more optimistic than I am.

Aaron Hurst:
It depends on the day.

Dani Johnson:
It gives me a little bit of hope. I'm curious, first of all, do you see a difference in organizations that are, that you would consider sort of purpose aligned or purpose driven organizations? Do you see a difference in the way that they deal with their people? So the talent management aspect?

Aaron Hurst:
Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, the ones that are doing it authentically are moving away from the idea of human resources and thinking of people as resources and like truly thinking of people as human beings and starting to really humanize their work practices and how they think about their people. And I think this has been accelerated due to COVID and the pandemic where it's hard to see people as anything other than human beings right now, and many organizations. So I think that that's absolutely the case. And, you know, I think there are companies that have just done the marketing version of purpose and, you know, for them often there isn't that actual internal shift. But I think that's going to be a very short-lived phenomenon because those people are not going to stay there because they're going to see that that's just a veneer so seeing an absolute change there and you see this in the interaction between a CHRO and a CEO at some of these companies where it's not just about like how engaged are my employees, what is the productivity of my employees, but it's about truly caring about their people and truly making sure that their, their needs are met and that they're set up to be their best self.

Aaron Hurst:
And it's this, you know, whole movement of bringing your full self to work. It's this whole movement around inclusion. It's the movement around enabling people to have much more autonomy. A lot of these things are really tied to the same, the same thread and the same set of values.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah. We've seen that. I mean, we've seen a big uptick in conversations around wellbeing and stress management and those types of things, especially since COVID started. I mean, it started a couple of years ago, but especially since COVID.

Aaron Hurst:
Yeah. It accelerated for sure.

Dani Johnson:
Yeah, for sure. Wondering do you see in those organizations that you are deemed sort of purpose driven or purpose aligned, are employees generally more engaged and connected and as a result of that more innovative and productive and all of the things that most traditional types of organizations are looking for?

Aaron Hurst:
It's all over the map. I think it again depends on like how the, how the company or organization's interpreting it. So give you an example, like nonprofit organizations chronically over index to impact as the form of purpose and cause, and often therefore under-invest in the two other critical areas for people which are the relationships and growth. So we see in research that actually like the level of fulfillment in many nonprofits is really not any better than in corporations and in some cases it's much worse. So I think it's really important to sort of understand that you can't just provide purpose and a sense of impact without also addressing the relationships and the growth piece. And I think the companies that are, you know, finding success now are the ones that are linking all three of those elements together to give them much more sort of a holistic view of what's going to take for an employee to truly thrive. And that's what we're seeing, we're seeing that difference. I think the ones that are just focused on impact often start to implode on themselves because it's like a one-legged stool, which I know is mixing metaphors, you'd have an imploding stool, but but you sort of get the point, like it's just, it's not how we work as human beings. We need all three of those things, the relationships, the impact and the growth.

Dani Johnson:
Okay. Yeah, I think that makes sense. The, some of the work, it definitely makes sense. Some of our work that Stacia did over the summer was on purpose-driven organizations. And one of the big discussions we had at the beginning of that, I don't want to call it an argument, but discussions that we had at the beginning of that had to do with what exactly is purpose and organizations. And one of the things that sort of came out of that was paying attention to more than just your external stakeholders. So the things you said about employees as stakeholders, this is really resonating. Do you think there are things that leaders in more traditional of companies can learn from those that you have deemed as purpose aligned or purpose driven?

Aaron Hurst:
The biggest thing is to try to help them break it down into smaller pieces. I think it sometimes feels like a giant jump. And to, I think, first of all, start off by looking at your current bright spots. So even the worst companies out there do things that I would put in the category of purpose. They may be a very small minority of their activities, but instead of starting with deficit thinking of ‘We aren't this,’ it's sort of saying, ‘Where are we this? Where are we doing things to humanize work? Where are we doing stakeholder engagement? Where are we building products and services in a way in which it's, you know, aligned with our values and figure out how do we do more of that and amplify it?’ versus starting off at this mindset of like, ‘Oh, we're nothing like these other organizations.’ There's always at least like a dash of DNA in every organization that has this. Whether that's a person, a group, a leader, there's always something you can build on. And just starting with that and building from it that sort of positive deviant, if you will. To me it's always the best place to start.

Dani Johnson:
Right on. So we know that the traditional measurements of success are often more geared toward how an organization is doing in the marketplace or in the market in general. How do we measure purpose? How do we measure whether or not organizations have purpose and what impact that's having on maybe some of the more traditional types of stuff?

Aaron Hurst:
Well, so I think there's the HR piece, then there's like the consumer community piece. So I think to your point, stakeholder engagement is a huge part of this and whether or not an organization is actually doing, doing those activities, which is much more of an activity measurement is a pretty strong indicator. From an HR standpoint, again, I go back to, you know, we've developed this measurement of fulfillment, which we think is sort of the byproduct of working in a purpose-driven culture which is, you know, looking at the relationships impacting growth that your employees are reporting. And to use that as your barometer of whether or not the stakeholder being your employees are truly thriving. And are they working in alignment with your values around purpose? I think those simple three questions—do the employees have meaningful relationships? Because we know the majority of people don't. Are they making an impact that's meaningful to them? And are they growing in a way that matters to them?—if you optimize for those three things like that alone creates the cascading changes that are necessary.

Aaron Hurst:
So I really encourage, you know, in a lot of our corporate partners that are using our platform are starting to use that as their sort of primary indicator of the sort of health wellbeing, fulfillment, purpose, whatever you want to say of their employee base instead of the antiquated old engagement measurement, which is rooted in a human resources mindset. And then on the consumer side, a lot of what I've seen and talked to a few folks about is using those same three things, relationships, impact, and growth, and saying, how are your products or services helping people build relationships, make an impact are growing. So for example, my wife, as the chief sustainability officer at Amazon just launched today, the ability to search for products on Amazon based on their impact on the climate, right? So that's enabling their consumers to actually make an impact, right? So by doing that, you're actually selling purpose in a way, because you're enabling people to be part of, of that solution. Or if you're at a company where you're helping people actually strengthen relationships with each other or pushing them and stretching them, how are you doing those things in your, your operations in your products and services is a pretty good proxy and trying to get away from just cause as the outcome because cause is way too simplistic.

Dani Johnson:
I sit on the board of an ESOP, which is an employee-owned organization and I expected going into that experience that it would just be a purpose-driven organization. They’re in Vermont and that would sort of feed back to the whole idea of employee owned. I assumed that they would spend quite a bit of effort on, on employees and employees as stakeholders and stuff like that. And they, they do, but I'm still surprised at the, the, the metrics that we use are still mostly externally facing. So I'm just wondering in these organizations, do you see a tradeoff between maybe some of the more traditional profitability metrics against some of the ones that you just talked about or do you see organizations being able to balance both?

Aaron Hurst:
It's a new muscle that companies are trying to figure out how to, how to balance? And I think the bigger challenge is short term versus long term. It's like a lot of what we're talking about today, you know, has been shown to have a better ROI, but it's not necessarily like at one day, one week, one quarter ROI. And getting out of that mindset, that's actually the bigger, the bigger challenge. And then I think it's unlearning a lot of things, right. Unlearning that there's a lot of things we do as companies that are just legacy behaviors and when you actually unpack them and realize where they came from, they're not aligned with your values. And I think that's where a lot of my thinking around employee engagement and this sort of idea of how do we maximize output per human widget. I don't think anyone really wants to treat their people that way, but that's really where that whole movement came from. And, you know, I think once you look at the root of those things, we can start to re-engineer, redesign a lot of how we lead when we're conscious of like the origins of those old practices that aren't aligned with our values.

Chris Pirie:
I have a question I want to ask in this section and it's you know, we think a lot about work, right? And, and clearly how people work is changing or feels like it's changing really, really rapidly. And maybe even for sure, accelerated this year by the pandemic, you, you have this lovely table in your book called the ‘12 New Work Rules,’ which is kind of from, and to kind of model. And for example, you talk about, you know, in the old world, if people were preoccupied about climbing a career ladder, now it's about finding meaning in the work they do every day. In the old world, it was, you know, retirement was a good thing. That's what we were all marching towards. In the new world, you know, we're never going to stop trying to make an impact and so on and so forth. And I think the combination one is, you know, the, the command used to be a professional and now it's kind of be a human. I love this table because I think it really sort of illustrates how the mindset about what work is is changing. But there's, there's, there's kind of an elephant in the room for me. I want to get your take on it.

Aaron Hurst:
I love elephants, so I’m excited.

Chris Pirie:
Real wages have been falling precipitously and the distribution of wealth particularly in the US but fairly globally is really really out of whack, you know, over the last 20 years. We've got new forms of employment emerging, like gig work, which feels like it doesn't offer any of these kind of essential protections for, for workers. Is that a factor in all this is, is, is this an, an apology for, for, you know, a decline in wages over a period of time? I have to ask.

Aaron Hurst:
No. I don’t think it’s an apology. I think it’s—As you look at each of these economic eras, there's different government regulation that came into being around it. I think the government has, because the information age sort of grew up out of the Reagan era and beyond where we held up companies as being more effective and more valuable than the government, which was in my mind, a big mistake. We never really regulated the information economy and we're seeing, you know, what's going on politically right now as a result of corporations, effectively keeping government out of regulation of that industry. And that has created problems that, you know, I'm hopeful we can get over, but right now it's pretty easy to be pretty cynical and say that, you know, we may not as a species recover from the lack of government regulation of those of those industries and the sort of holding up Silicon Valley as the best of humanity, instead of just seeing it as creativity, which can go in a thousand different directions.

Aaron Hurst:
I think when we look at the purpose economy, I think we're seeing, you know, similarly, this is not, you know, it's not effectively being regulated and that's connected to those same things. So, you know, I wrote in the book about, you know, Uber, Airbnb, these things all come out of that same impulse around purpose and empowering people and enabling them to take more autonomy, more control of their lives being out in the community, more sort of disintermediation. All those things are positive, but they're not being effectively regulated. And we're not addressing the sort of underlying problems in the economy that really did emerge heavily. And that sort of eighties where we're seeing such a separation of classes in our society. And I think of government doesn't get involved in play its role. These things will become massive problems and they're already pretty damn big problems to begin with.

Aaron Hurst:
So I don't see it as much as apology. I see it as fundamental failure of our society to recognize the importance of government, the importance of regulation, and that we can't just trust companies to do what is sort of in the broader and broader thought of good. And I don't think we've figured it out. If you think about Moore's Law around sort of the acceleration and speed of processing and computing power, we, we've never figured out how to create a Moore's Law speed for regulation. And therefore everything's just completely out of date and the problems are emerging and becoming really bad before government even has time to process and think about the role it wants to play. And there's so much ability to then use that information and that technology to distort the public perspective, our point of view on it, so that it's nearly impossible to build the political will to address these issues.

Stacia Garr:
There's one question I really want to get at. And we focused on in the research report and that is around what's HR’s opportunity during crises, or just in general, around purpose. How do you see the role of HR in enabling organizations to achieve their purpose?

Aaron Hurst:
It's such an important question. And I think it's a really sort of look at what the role of HR has been historically. And I think even the name itself like human resources sort of speaks to, I think the old model of how we thought about work, how we thought about the role of work in our lives and the way we thought about management versus sort of employees. And I think in the past, the role of HR was around optimizing sort of output from a human resource and mitigating sort of liability from that resource and to sort of making sure there's always a bumper crop of new resources sort of coming in. And I think in the purpose economy though, the role needs to shift pretty fundamentally from this idea of sort of control to much more about lifting up. It has to go to much more of a role of seeing people truly as human beings.

Aaron Hurst:
I'm looking at, you know, how do we do mass personalization of the experience of work? How do we understand the psychology of work and what brings out the best in people? How do we proactively play a role in making sure that we've built, you know, cultures where there's a sense of belonging? How are we making sure we're hiring people who are truly aligned with the mission and purpose of the organization? How are we helping to build conversation internally that like aligns people as a tribe? So I think that's an we've been doing this evolution over the last 20 years, but I think it really brings to the forefront that needs to make that shift. And at the core that I think really is this idea of moving away from the idea of management and employees to human beings and human beings.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. And I think that gets at some of the work that Dani and I have been doing around we've, we've thought about it as responsive organizations, but basically organizations where it's not commanding control, but it's really much more about pushing information and decision-making down and relying on some basic principles of human decency, respect and crossing primary of those two divisions.

Aaron Hurst:
I think that's right. I think there was a couple of things I would just sort of sort of double down. I think one there is a need to enable people to process information differently, I think than the past, information was thought of as like, you know, the equivalent of like coding where it's like a command or information that has to be digested. Whereas I think now it's an understanding of like there's a psychological change management process, so needing to help people process that which often is through conversation. It's through doing work around identity it's around doing work around, what does this mean for me so much more of an acknowledgement of that change management process versus just dissemination. And the thing that we found in our research that I thought was really interesting is that when we asked people, who is responsible for your fulfillment? Primarily people pretty overwhelmingly said they were responsible for their own fulfillment.

Aaron Hurst:
And when we asked people like what the number one barrier to fulfillment at work was their top answer was they were their own biggest barrier. And I think that fundamentally changes the way you think about the role of HR and management. If you assume that people are responsible for their own fulfillment and people see themselves as the greatest barrier, then your job is to help people remove their own barriers. They're creating for themselves, creating space for that and helping them do what they need to do. Whereas the old model is let's engage people, let's have engagement happen to people. What we're hearing, when you look at it from much more of a human centered point of view is people are ready to own it. And they see themselves as a barrier and the role of management and HR is to help them sort of do that work.

Stacia Garr:
Interesting.

Chris Pirie:
That's a really interesting parallel between what's going on in the learning segment as well, whether, you know, that used to be about training about this command and control transfer of knowledge to the employee. And now there's much more of an embracing of the L&D role to be, to create a culture where learning happens rather than do learning.

Aaron Hurst:
A CHRO told me recently, it's just like, you've got so many different needs and you can never anticipate those needs. So it's more about it is about building that culture. And a lot of people are talking about like as a coaching culture, which is this idea of a continuous growth and learning and challenge, and that it has to be personalized to what people need in the moment, not even what they needed yesterday.

Stacia Garr:
Let's maybe bring that to what's happening right now. So, so obviously, you know, there's, there's been a big focus on COVID—on purpose, excuse me—with COVID as well as social justice movements in the light. So maybe kind of just starting first with you, how has your own work changed this year? And then we'll talk about what's happening with organizations.

Aaron Hurst:
For me personally this year has been like, I mean, I felt guilty saying this but it's been a great year just in the sense that you know, in the work that I'm doing, I'm getting to, you know, work from home. So I'm spending a lot less time sort of dealing with commuting. I'm getting to spend more time with family a lot less stress associated with that. And the work we're actually doing you know, helping people connect is so at the core of what's needed right now. And then to see, I think with Black Lives Matter becoming more and more part of the dialogue of the nation does, you know, my values and what I care about being taken more and more seriously is just like music to my ears. So it's just, it's been a source of a lot of inspiration that way. You know, the flip side of that would be the election, which I think has had the opposite effect which has been very disheartening.

Stacia Garr:
And then as you think about purpose, has it evolved this year? And if so, in what ways.

Aaron Hurst:
I think it's evolved. I mean, again, depending on like how the angle you're looking at it, I think it's we've seen sort of the sense of people needing to take care of care of each other, taking care of family. There's been much more of a focus on the sort of family unit part of purpose. I think the, the ability to take care of one's own health has become sort of very front and center, but I think there's been this general bigger trend which is an acknowledgement that of the psychology work and the psychology of our lives, and being able to see people in their home settings realizing sort of the real world, like the influences of their lives from their health to their family, et cetera, there's been a major move of humanizing work. And I think that at the core purpose is about humanizing work.

Aaron Hurst:
And therefore, I feel like there's been this like incredible opening to have those. And I've seen so many companies talk about things they're doing now to have real dialogue in their company that a year ago wouldn't have been possible. They wouldn't have had the courage to do it. We've seen CEOs of major companies saying like, if you don't align with our values, if you don't think Black Lives Matter is like a real thing, like maybe you don't belong here. It's really just interesting to see how much more courage CEOs have had in the last year. It's given them permission to, to lead more courageously.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah, definitely. So one of the things we mentioned in the report, we said you know, this year has given organizations a mandate with regard to purpose: you either walk the walk, or you walk away. It’s actively a litmus test for purpose. Do you think that's true or how have you been thinking about that?

Aaron Hurst:
Purpose is really broad. I think that's generally true. I think this is a time when there's like a lot less sort of interest in, you know, purpose washing a lot less interest in sort of just pure marketing. And there's a lot of, there's a whole movement around sort of performative activity versus actually like doing things. There's a lot more skepticism, which I think brings that up. And there's been some interesting, you know, research on the companies that, you know, looked at redefining the purpose of a company and whether or not in these times of challenge and change they're doing that. Or if they're sort of falling back to drift more traditional models. I'd like to think the majority of organizations are sort of moving in the right direction. But then you have companies that I think where there's just a ton of gray area. I mean, you look a lot of the companies in Silicon Valley, there's a lot of courage going on a lot of different ways, but there's also a lot of just continuing to be part of the problem. And I think it's, it is really hard, especially if all of your revenue is tied to behaviors that may not be as aligned with sort of the world we want to see.

Stacia Garr:
Yeah. You know, it's, it's a great point. I think between people not being as interested in purpose washing and, and I think that that's being backed up by consumers. There was a study from Edelman, their trust barometer. They ran a whole version of that back in June. And they, they found that basically organizations wanted brands to lead, particularly when it came to social justice and that if they weren't having their own house in order that they were actively, individuals would move away from purchasing those products. So kind of, I think really this strength behind, don't just talk the talk, you really have to walk the walk.

Aaron Hurst:
And it's hard. I mean, think it's a hard thing to show walking the walk, especially as a consumer to look at a company because it's so hard to understand what's really going on there and to get beyond the marketing, which is why, you know, as I've shared before, I think it's so important to look at where companies are spending their lobbying money, because that really is the indicator whether or not they're walking the walk and looking at how people are treating their people. Everything else is like, it's really hard to discern. What's real. And what's not.

Chris Pirie:
I think one of the things that we've seen right now in real time is that, you know, companies are having to make tough decisions around hiring and furloughing and laying off people just because of the hard economics of how you run a company. And I wonder if that will tarnish this trend.

Aaron Hurst:
Oh, it's so hard. I think that's, I think the early relief that was given by the federal government to help people and help certain industries really helped address a lot of that in the short term. But now that that's sort of behind us, we are seeing an awful lot of that. And, you know, seeing the airlines doing major layoffs, you know, there's you know, I think we're going to see a lot of layoffs fourth quarter of 2020. And it is, you know, how you do that, I think makes a big difference. And, you know, I, I haven't read like how well it worked, but I did like what Airbnb did, where they actually basically tried to help people get hired by enabling employees to post that they're looking and putting recommendations for them recognizing they weren't laying off people based on performance, and that there were a lot of great people that had to let go. So I think the more companies can do to visibly support their folks in an authentic way is going to make a big difference for their brand.

Chris Pirie:
Question here on the future of how we contract for our labor. Is purpose, as a concept, is it better tied to sort of entrepreneurial work than, than corporate work? Or do you see equally useful in both environments?

Aaron Hurst:
I don't know that distinction is as important as like just level of autonomy within work. And I think that when you don't have any autonomy, it's harder to find a sense of purpose because you have lessons or control and less ability to tailor it to what matters to you. Versus you know, when you have a high level of autonomy, you have a lot of ability to craft your work, to really align with what matters to you.

Aaron Hurst:
You know, I think if you think about purpose of broadest sense, I mean, the resources that a larger organization can bring to bear can do a lot to make it much easier to have a sense of purpose for as a startup, which can be completely overwhelming. And just, you know, under-resourced, and you're just trying to like stay alive. I think there's a sense of being sort of sure, constantly in the state of high, high anxiety, high purpose in a startup just because, you know, every day is a battle. But I think that also can lead to a lot of burnout and it's not always the type of purpose that is healthy in the long run. And having been in startups, basically my whole career. I mean, I think there's just that is a sprint. It's not a marathon. And that's not always the best.

Stacia Garr:
Just as you think about talent leaders, going back to who we started or who I started with a moment ago, what kind of advice would you have for them regarding purpose, especially right now? I mean given everything that we just discussed.

Aaron Hurst:
My top advice would be to create space for your people to truly have human conversations and human relationships, because that is at the core of what's going to enable the right ideas to come forward, the confidence and the right mindset to adapt and to change, that need for human connection, like really is at the core of what's needed to bring purpose to the forefront in the workplace right now. And that it is really important for leaders to be modeling this behavior themselves and for them to be talking about what they're doing very publicly so that people understand that, like this isn't just something that's asked of them, but it's something that authentically the whole organization is doing. I think the other big pieces that we'd need to really invest right now in human skills. One of the biggest barriers to purpose in our work is just how much our managers, our people lack basic human skills, basic communication skills, basic emotional skills, and all this talk on purpose, et cetera, doesn't really have the impact that's needed unless people are able to show up as human beings and to not be in a state of constant fear. They need to be able to move into a state of hope, a state of what's possible and that, you know, one of the key things we need to do as talent leaders is to create that kind of environment where that is possible.

Dani Johnson:
It's really interesting that you used the term human skills and not soft skills. We hear a lot about soft skills versus hard skills, but I think your term of human skills is actually probably more appropriate.

Aaron Hurst:
Soft skills is a problematic term because it tends to undervalue them. Especially when it's compared to like hard skills. And if you look at, you know, the research has all showing, like what CEOs are wanting is that, you know, human skills and that that's where the core skills gap is. And the challenges of teaching human skills is very different than teaching technical skills. And we tend to apply technical skills, training, modality to human skills, and we don't recognize that human skills are much more tied into psychology and therefore just need a totally different process.

Dani Johnson:
We're doing some work on skills right now, and most organizations divide skills into soft skills and hard skills. What's really interesting though, is the way that you measure hard skills or where you think about hard skills is completely void, train hard skills is completely different than the way that you measure and train and think about softer skills or what you're calling human skills.

Aaron Hurst:
No, and they show up so differently based on the environment, whereas like, you know, knowing how to code in Python tends to show up similarly in every environment. Knowing how to communicate effectively with different people. It shows up so differently. And we're so triggered by different things.

Dani Johnson:
Chris always askes his guests where their sense of purpose comes from, or if there was a person or event that had prompted you to sort of spend your life doing what you're doing, but how did you decide to spend your life this way? Or did you just stumble into it?

Aaron Hurst:
I think it's both. So I think at some level I'm just a curious bastard and I just constantly just follow where my curiosity takes me. And I'm constantly asking questions, I'm turning over stones and then sort of saying, what if you did this? What if you did that? And then all of a sudden, it's like three years later and I'm like in the throes of it. So a lot of it just is like following that curiosity thread you know, which I think brings in your values, it brings in your purpose all into that, you know, thread. You know, I think there are a bunch of people who have really inspired me in this work. My grandfather is the one I talk about most. He worked for President Kennedy and help build the Peace Corps, which, you know, to him was really about like, how do you help bring different cultures together through meaningful connection?

Aaron Hurst:
And then his work running the Aspen Institute for 25 years, which was again about having people from different political backgrounds, professions, et cetera, coming together and finding shared humanity. And so we're coming up with solutions together. So that sort of is so tied to my work of this idea of helping people find their better selves and bringing it into the public square finding ways to connect with other people. But then my parents had a big role in this as well. I, my, my father was a, you know, a PhD in a higher education administration, so sort of OD, and just always loved the work around organizational development. And both my parents were Jewish by descent, but active Buddhist. And I think that combination of sort of Buddhist and Jewish upbringing also led me into a lot of this work and the idea of like, how do we repair the world? How do we be more conscious? How can we be constantly on a path to, you know, some version of enlightenment? So these things all really sort of come together to point me to where I am today, but I would say curiosity has been definitely the thing and it hasn't killed this cat yet, but I'm sure one day it will.

Chris Pirie:
I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk about your current venture. You know, we talked about Taproot earlier on, can you tell us what you're up to at the moment?

Aaron Hurst:
Yeah. So Imperative is a venture-backed technology company that has built a platform that enables a company to match their employees on an ongoing basis in peer coaching conversations. So basically conversations to support each other, to stand back and like reflect on what's going on. So creating that space for reflection, just to pull out of the hamster wheel and then to just build these deep, real, true human connections throughout their organization. So it's a platform that’s really being used to help, you know, managers connect with other managers and like really support each other, or to get people from different backgrounds to really connect inside the organization. And it really is acting as sort of a counterbalance to most technology, which has been about sort of preying on sort of a lot of fear and anxiety and the sort of sending out information after information after information. We're trying to take the space back for real human connection and finding there's just such a hunger for that, both from employees, but also from leadership to be able to do that.

Aaron Hurst:
And we really see with Imperative that it's going to become the backbone of the culture of organizations that this intentional reflection and connection time is gonna, you know, soon be as common as sort of a one-on-one that we considered a sort of a standard part of business practice because the neuroscience, the positive psychology, the change management, it's all pointing to this as really the only way to do it. So, you know, we're working with companies now deploying this. We're seeing that it's, you know, creating like profound relationships, it's creating behavior change. It's having people take ownership of their fulfillment and their effectiveness. And then that whole process has giving, you know, whole new insights to companies about what's going on with their employees and what they really care about. So I'm just really hopeful that this is really going to be the start of a major next chapter and purpose and the humanizing of work. And I'm really, I'm encouraged by the reaction to it so far.

Chris Pirie:
Really exciting stuff. And, and, and on theme.

Aaron Hurst:
On curiosity.

Chris Pirie:
Listen, I want to thank you for your time today and sort of giving us this primer and we are going to go off now and have some conversations, in fact, we’ve already started with some really interesting people who are putting some of your ideas into practice and learning as we go, so thanks a lot for your time, Aaron.

Dani Johnson:
Thanks, Aaron. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you.

Aaron Hurst:
I loved it. Thanks for putting this together.