Why You Should Build a Culture of Purpose

Today’s post is by Christoph Lueneburger, author of A Culture of Purpose (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

In the summer of 2002, John Replogle – currently CEO of Seventh Generation Inc., a leading maker of environmentally friendly personal and household products – was US President of a beer company. John recalls that one morning, as he was backing the family car out the driveway… “I looked in the rear-view mirror and saw these two young girls looking back at me.” His daughters. “I had an epiphany. I had been working with my coach that morning on a mission statement, and frankly it was all about me. I was thirty-five years old. I was president of $900 million business. I lived in a wonderful house in Connecticut with my wife and two kids. I mean it was ideal. And I realized I was on the wrong course.” Then and there, John started focusing more of his energies on improving the wider world.

Fast forward a year. John was now general manager for Unilever’s North American skin care division, encouraging his new team to break out of business as usual, innovate, and be nimble. “We were talking about how we needed to be more maverick, to take more chances,” John says. He soon experienced a powerful connection between this drive to be bold and his earlier epiphany in the family car. As part of exploring new directions for its iconic Dove® brand, Unilever team members were asked to videotape their own daughters talking about beauty. “They could all see beauty in each other, but they had real difficulty seeing it in themselves,” John notes. The deeper meaning was unmistakable. Here was an opportunity to promote real sustainable change — not just in a process or a product, but in the daily lives of human beings.

Fueled by this realization, Unilever launched a major global study, The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report,which found that only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful. These findings in turn shaped the now-famous “Dove Campaign for Real Beauty” which showcased photographs of regular women (in place of professional models), taken by Annie Leibovitz. Unilever also launched the Dove Self-Esteem Fund in collaboration with the Girl Scouts, and committed to ongoing efforts to actively foster confidence among girls and women.

Kees Kruythoff, Unilever’s president of North America, calls the celebrated Campaign for Real Beauty a natural outgrowth of Unilever’s culture. “Sustainability to me means drawing an arc from sustainable business – a business built to last – to a better life for consumers,” he says. That concept of sustainability is nothing new at Unilever. “The biggest issue in Victorian England was hygiene, and Lord Lever made hygiene commonplace,” Kees notes. “Right from the beginning, Unilever was built to contribute to the biggest issues in society.”

In short, Unilever is rooted, from its very beginnings, in a culture of purpose. Because it captures an ideal, a purpose goes beyond profitable growth, shareholder value, or any other measure of whether you are doing things right. A purpose, instead, is a pledge to do the right things. Audacious and bold, a purpose inspires a meaningful number of people to take action.

There is a symbiosis between top talent and cultures of purpose: more than ever, the smartest and most creative and passionate minds are drawn to places that reflect their values.

Cultures of purpose don’t fall from the sky; they don’t spring from happy accidents or baffling evolutions. Whether they are borne of a rich history or what you happen to see in your rear-view mirror, such cultures are ultimately built, over time and with concrete building blocks. And sustainability provides the most reliable blueprint for assembling these building blocks into a culture of purpose.

Here are some questions to explore as you look to build your own culture of purpose:

– What is the purpose of my organization? Is it both clear and aligned with my own sense of purpose?

– Am I working in a culture of purpose? If not, what would make it one?

– How did the best ideas in my organization develop? Are there mechanisms that reward risk taking and failure?

– What criteria do I use to generate ideas? To assess the ideas of others?

Christoph Lueneburger is the author of A Culture of Purpose: How to Choose the Right People and Make the Right People Choose You (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

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