Leading with Purpose: Organizations Crushing It and Shaping a Better World

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Transcript:

(AI Generated)

I'm wholeheartedly agreed with you on that. I think we need a couple of organizations that are crushing it, and we need to simultaneously reward those organizations and make them desirable. Adam Smith, the founder of Modern Economics, said it best. He said, the secret of education is directing people's vanities towards the right causes.

And I think the right cause over here is getting people to value not the hoarding of wealth as we valued in decades past. You know, the Forbes list to me is this disgusting thing. It's like we're valuing the hoarders in society, people who have the most amount of money, who've been able to accrue a disproportionate amount of wealth and cause asymmetry in society.

That I think is just not producing the positive sum benefits that we need desperately. So if we see organizations that are doing it well, for example, Patagonia Fascinating, right here you have Yvon Chouinard relinquishing a hundred percent of a stake in the company to fight. A challenge that affects us all remarkable.

You see organizations, for example, like Salesforce with Mark Benioff taking a very human-centric approach to the layoffs. Unfortunately, like many other tech companies, they had to let people go. Airbnb had to do that as well. But rather than doing so in a cold calculated way, you do so in a very human-centric way.

I mean, in the case of Airbnb, beautiful, you saw Brian Chesky is the CEO's name, write heartfelt letters to all of the employees being let go, explaining in great detail why they were let go, building a platform to showcase their work to future employees so that they can land on their feet sooner.

So these sorts of examples are things that we need to put the spotlight on and say that's the way we do it. Satya Nadella another example. Microsoft was able to turn the company around after it was being run into the ground by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, during what they call the lost decade at Microsoft.

Here comes an leader who says we're gonna recenter this organization on the needs of the customer. I think it was the first leadership meeting retreat that they had where people were surprised. You go to these leadership retreats, you expect to be in a ballroom in a hotel all the time.

Yeah. Instead, what happens is a bunch of buses show up and here you have Satya Nadella saying, all the leaders get into the buses, we're gonna drive to malls, we're gonna drive to stores all across America, all across the region and talk to customers. I mean, that's the way we do things. These are the things that need to be celebrated here.

And I know that IKEA has a long history and Jens you have quite a history with ikea. IKEA has a history of being very human-centric in their approach to the customer experience, which I think, if I had to guess, is a direct reflection of how the leadership treats their employees.