If
you are a seasoned executive in today’s job queue, you are no doubt
being sensitized to the quandary of age discrimination. From the lunch
lady in Springfield, Illinois to the CEO of a men’s haberdashery,
companies are betting on youth to preserve their vitality and inject new
blood to ramp up their corporate circulation. A recent Google web
search on “Age Discrimination” yielded 15.5 million results while the
news category alone showed 753,000 hits. I suspect that the topic will
continue to be one of great concern and importance as Baby Boomers,
(those born between 1945 and 1964) and Gen X’ers (born between 1960 and
1980,) come face to face with their mortality and the trend to jettison
old cargo.
Quoting a New York Times article
on the topic, “At a time when digital skills are prized and businesses
place a premium on youth, some employers subtly seek to push out older
workers. They deny them raises once awarded routinely, reduce their
responsibilities or give evaluations that are cold and complain of
waning productivity.” And despite the fact that some firms are stepping
out to retain older workers, the issue remains a thorn in the sides of
those waiting in unemployment lines.
The fact is that employers
who take the stance that “older is obsolete,” are missing a grand
opportunity to harness brains, brawn and bravado to grow their
businesses with experienced, seasoned people who know and understand the
pain points of the business and can contribute solutions to alleviate
the suffering.
Despite the lack of action by the nation’s
lawmakers, there seems to be agreement on the value of older workers. A
survey of some 40 articles on reasons to hire people who have been
around the horn a few times yielded some important insight. Herewith are
ten tactics that can and should be employed when you are casting about
for your next executive adventure.
1. “Bold and Beautiful.”
Don’t be shy about social platforms. Employ them all in showcasing your
youth, experience, energy and endurance. And it’s not just about
LinkedIn. Platforms like Facebook, Quora, About.me, VisualCV, Twitter
and Pinterest, just to name a few, should be used to highlight who you
are, what you have done and what you bring to the table. Their use also
shows you are current with today’s trends and social skills.
2. “Locked and loaded.”
Emphasize in your outreach materials, like your resume/CV, your ability
to be a quick study and have a short learning curve. Chances are that
companies are desperately seeking, in real time, a package of abilities
that fit your requirements like a glove.
3. “Up and running.”
Strongly convey how your track record closely aligns with the company’s
position specifications, allowing the organization to implement
solutions faster because of your experience and transferable
accomplishments. In that vein, tailor every resume to the job spec. The
trend to “one size fits all” has long passed.
4. “Coach and conquer.” Senior
folks often make great coaches and mentors; and can help drive culture,
camaraderie and consistency throughout the organization. Give active
examples of how you have driven culture change, improved results to the
bottom line and helped younger staff excel in their jobs.
5. “Patience is a virtue.”
Because of your tenure in the workforce, you likely have more endurance
and forbearance to withstand the highs and lows of successfully running
a business and its components. Provide vivid examples of your patience,
tenacity and endurance to bring to light how they can benefit a
potential employer.
6. “Timely and temperate.”
Experienced employees are prompt, courteous and even tempered.
Experience has made you wiser and highly aware of deadlines and
commitments. Let the record show your track record.
7. “Low maintenance.”
By virtue of your tenure, experienced workers, particularly those in
the unemployment queue, do not have unreasonable demands. They have seen
the good, the bad and the ugly of working life, are more accommodating
and have greater levels of fortitude. Should you make it to the offer
stage, make your demands minimal and easy to accommodate.
8. “Loyal soldiers.”
Experience often engenders great loyalty. And according to studies like
MetLife’s research project in 2012, Boomers have higher levels of
loyalty than other generations. Furthermore, Boomers grew up in a time
where loyalty was both valued and rewarded and a team sport. In telling
your story, weave in examples to demonstrate your legacy of loyalty and
your adeptness at assembling teams able to scale tall buildings and walk
through walls.
9. “Distracted driving.” Boomers
have less diversions and disruptions than later generations. Chances are
the kids are grown and the daily pressures of youth have abated and
there is more time to devote to one’s profession and passions. Let your
passion show through in interviews and how you respond to questions.
10. “Knowledge and network.”
Networks are growing ever important to the sales process. It no longer
is simple enough to run advertisements to sell a product. Influence and
knowledge are growing as drivers of purchasing. Boomers are ready made
for the task because of their experience, knowledge and tenure and they
don’t require tons of training. Use your network liberally in spreading
the word about your good work, passion and experience. Don’t be shy
about asking for a helping hand.
About the author
BlueSteps Member Executive Guest Writer
Gerard F. Corbett, Chair and CEO, Redphlag LLC
Gerard F. Corbett is Chair and Chief Executive Officer of Redphlag LLC,
a strategic public relations, marketing management and executive
coaching consulting firm, a position he has held since January 2008. He
also serves as Immediate Past Chair & CEO of the Public Relations
Society of America (PRSA,) the world’s largest member organization of
public relations practitioners. He is accredited in public relations
(APR) and a member of the PRSA College of Fellows.
By Jack and Suzy Welch
We've
always said that human resources should be the most powerful part of an
organization. So why, in reality, is its impact more often felt in a
negative way?
Because human resources, unfortunately, often
operates as a cloak-and-dagger society or a health-and-happiness
sideshow. Those are extremes, of course, but if there is anything we
have learned over the past five years of traveling and talking to
business groups, it is that HR rarely functions as it should. That’s an
outrage, made only more frustrating by the fact that most leaders aren’t
scrambling to fix it.
Look, HR should be every company’s “killer
app.” What could possibly be more important than who gets hired,
developed, promoted, or moved out the door? Business is a game, and as
with all games, the team that puts the best people on the field and gets
them playing together wins. It’s that simple.
You would never
know it, though, to look at the companies today where the CFO reigns
supreme and HR is relegated to the background. It just doesn’t make
sense. If you owned the Boston Red Sox, for instance, would you hang
around with the team accountant or the director of player personnel?
Sure,
the accountant can tell you the financials. But the director of player
personnel knows what it takes to win: how good each player is and where
to find strong recruits to fill talent gaps. Several years ago we spoke
to 5,000 HR professionals in Mexico City. At one point we asked the
audience: “How many of you work at companies where the leader gives HR a
seat at the table equal to that of the CFO?” After an awkward silence,
fewer than 50 people raised their hands. Awful!
Since then, we
have tried to understand why HR has become so marginalized. As noted
above, there are at least two extremes of bad behavior.
The
stealthy stuff occurs when HR managers become little kingmakers, making
and breaking careers, sometimes not even at the leader’s behest. These
HR departments can indeed be powerful, but often in a detrimental way,
prompting the best people to leave just to get away from the palace
intrigue.
Almost as often, though, you get the other extreme: HR
departments that plan picnics, put out the plant newsletter (complete
with time-in-service anniversaries duly noted), and generally drive
everyone crazy by enforcing rules and regulations that appear to have no
purpose other than to bolster the bureaucracy. They derive the little
power they have by being cloyingly benevolent on one hand and company
scolds on the other.
So how do leaders fix this mess? It all
starts with the people they appoint to run HR—not kingmakers or cops but
big leaguers, men and women with real stature and credibility. In fact,
managers need to fill HR with a special kind of hybrid: people who are
part pastor (hearing all sins and complaints without recrimination) and
part parent (loving and nurturing, but giving it to you straight when
you’re off track).
Pastor-Parent types can come up through the HR
department, but more often than not, they have run something during
their careers, such as a factory or a function. They get the
business—its inner workings, history, tensions, and the hidden
hierarchies that exist in people’s minds. They are known to be
relentlessly candid, even when the message is hard, and they hold
confidences tight. With their insight and integrity, pastor-parents earn
the trust of the organization.
But pastor-parents don’t just sit
around making people feel warm and fuzzy. They improve the company by
overseeing a rigorous appraisal-and-evaluation system that lets every
person know where he or she stands, and they monitor that system with
the same intensity as a Sarbanes-Oxley compliance officer.
Leaders
must also make sure that human resources fulfills two other roles. It
should create effective mechanisms, such as money, recognition, and
training, to motivate and retain people. And it should force
organizations to confront their most charged relationships, such as
those with unions, individuals who are no longer delivering results, or
stars who are becoming problematic by, for instance, swelling instead of
growing.
Now, considering your negative experience with human
resources—and you are hardly alone—this kind of high-impact HR activity
probably sounds like a pipe dream. But given the fact that most leaders
loudly proclaim that people are their “biggest asset,” it shouldn’t be.
It
can’t be. Leaders need to put their money where their mouth is and get
HR to do its real job: elevating employee management to the same level
of professionalism and integrity as financial management. Since people
are the whole game, what could be more important?
Jack Welch is Executive Chairman of the Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University. Through its Executive MBA
program, the Jack Welch Management Institute provides students and
organizations with the proven methodologies, immediately actionable
practices, and respected credentials needed to win in business.
Suzy
Welch is a best-selling author, popular television commentator, and
noted business journalist. Her New York Times bestselling book, 10-10-10: A Life Transforming Idea,
presents a powerful decision-making strategy for success at work and in
parenting, love and friendship. Together with her husband Jack Welch,
Suzy is also co-author of the #1 international bestseller Winning, and its companion volume, Winning: The Answers. Since 2005, they have written business columns for several publications, including Business Week magazine, Thomson Reuters digital platforms, Fortune magazine, and the New York Times syndicate.
A version of this column originally appeared in BusinessWeek Magazine.
Posted by:
Jack Welch
by Andrew Winston
Somehow it’s already year-end, a time to look back and try to
make sense of what’s happened. Creating any “top” list of stories from
12 months is nearly impossible. But as I’ve done for the last 4 years,
I’ll attempt to summarize some of the latest stories about the big
environmental and social pressures on business, and how some innovative
companies are dealing with them.
This year, like recent years, saw some continuation of big trends: with a few exceptions, the international policy community keeps failing to come to a meaningful agreement on climate change; carbon emissions just keep rising; transparency
is increasingly unavoidable and keeps gaining technology-enabled
traction; pressure from big companies on their suppliers keeps going up.
So what’s really new this year? Let’s dive in.
The Big Picture
1. The science of climate change gets clearer: the IPCC lowers our carbon “budget.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its wonky, but readable, Summary for Policymakers
(a precursor to the full 2014 report). The report expresses “near
certainty” that humans are causing climate change and calculates how
much more carbon we can “safely” put in the atmosphere and hold to the
2-degree warming threshold that the world’s leaders have agreed to (and
some scientists are suggesting that even the 2-degree threshold is too high).
The short story is that we have less room than before. PwC’s annual Low Carbon Economy Index
report concluded that we must lower global carbon intensity (the amount
of carbon produced for every dollar of GDP) by 6% per year until 2100, a
percentage point lower than last year’s report recommended. On the
upside, similar calculations from WWF and McKinsey suggests that this
pace of change –they endorse a 3% reduction in absolute emissions per year through 2020 – will actually be very profitable.
2. The reality of climate change and pollution get scarier:
Australian heat, Philippine devastation, and Chinese air pollution all
break records.
The models and carbon budgets aside, the weather this year got even
more extreme, helping make the case for action in a more visceral way.
In January, Australia’s meteorologists had to add new colors to weather maps
to deal with temperatures ranging up to 54 degrees Celsius (129 degrees
Fahrenheit). And in November, after the Philippines faced the most powerful storm ever recorded to hit land, some climatologists suggested we add a “Category 6” to the top end of the storm scale.
While it’s impossible to tie any single weather event to climate change, the complicated correlation got clearer this year.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration concluded that
“high temperatures, such as those experienced in the U.S. in 2012, are
now likely to occur four times as frequently due to human-induced
climate change.”
In parallel, China’s air became, at times, dangerous and unbreathable. Several cities experienced days with small-particle air pollution running 25 to 40 times higher
than the World Health Organization’s recommended limit. This may seem
like a regional story, but it has global ramifications for
manufacturing, consumer goods, the energy industry, and much more. The
world’s most populous country is taking increasingly drastic action,
such as slashing Beijing’s new sales quota for cars by 40%.
3. The clean tech markets keep growing fast: three of the world’s
biggest economies — the U.S., Germany, and Walmart — add lots more
renewable energy.
In October, 99% of the new energy added to the grid in the U.S. came from renewables (solar alone was 72%). Germany keeps breaking its own records, with wind and solar providing 59% of the country’s energy one sunny day in October. And America’s wind power has quadrupled over the last 5 years; wind is now generating enough electricity to power the state of Georgia.
In addition, electric and hybrid cars are about 4% of US auto sales
now, a doubling of market share in the last couple of years. Companies
are increasing investments as well. Walmart, already the largest private
sector buyer of solar power in the US (with more solar capacity than 38 U.S. states), committed to a 600% increase in renewable energy by 2020.
4. Deep concerns about labor conditions, wages, and equity
take root: From tragedies in Bangladeshi apparel factories to minimum
wages in the U.S.
Travesties like the death of more than 1100 workers at the Rana Plaza apparel factory
in Bangladesh are increasingly unacceptable to the buying public. And
it’s getting harder to hide how connected we all are to these workers.
When the news hit about the loss of life, front pages around the world
included the names of major brands that depended on the factory to make
their goods. A startup called Labor Voices is now collecting information
on working conditions in Bangladesh and elsewhere in a shockingly
simple way: by giving workers a number to call from their cell phones,
which everybody now has.
European companies are doing more than U.S. peers, at least publicly, to commit to higher safety standards. Swedish retailer H&M recently said it would pay a “living wage” to 850,000 workers
in its supply chain by 2018 – a somewhat vague, but important
announcement. And to be fair, while U.S. companies haven’t been as
clear, Walmart has contracted with Labor Voices to gather data on its 300+ Bangladeshi suppliers and subcontractors.
On the other side of the ocean, though, Walmart, McDonald’s, and many others are facing increasing challenges about minimum wages. Watch this space, as it seems unlikely that this debate will go away.
5. Food and food waste gets more attention, debate, and innovation: Can cows save the world, or should we make meat in labs?
The level of concern about how we’re going to feed 9 billion people
by 2050 is rising. Food waste also got more attention: a UN report
estimated that the world throws out $750 billion worth of food annually. Food is too big a topic to summarize, but a few stories grabbed my eye this year. Fenugreen,
a smart startup that won the Sustainable Brands Innovation Open in
June, sells sheets of paper made with natural ingredients that fight
food decay – they can keep fruit and veggies from going bad 2 to 4 times
longer than they would last normally.
On a different front, Biologist Allen Savory made a splash with a much viewed TED talk
about how grazing cattle in a way that fertilizes land and sequesters
carbon can fight desertification and climate change. His theory is under attack, at least to the extent that his method could make a significant
dent in our climate problem. Wherever the science on this ends up, it’s
an important discussion that brings more focus to systems thinking and
to the nexus of food, energy, and water. Finally, a quirky, totally
different meat story was fascinating. Billionaires Bill Gates and Sergey Brin are funding experiments
to grow meat in labs, a process that – once people get past any “ick”
factor – could greatly reduce the footprint of producing meat-based
protein.
What Companies Are Doing
6. (Some) businesses get off the sidelines in the climate policy fight: Hundreds of companies sign onto the Climate Declaration.
Started by the NGO Ceres, as part of its Business for Innovative Climate & Energy Policy (BICEP) initiative, the Climate Declaration
is a broad statement of intent that acting on climate will be good for
our economy and society. A large range of leading companies have signed
on including Diageo, ebay, EMC, Gap, GM, IKEA, Intel, Microsoft,
Nestle, Nike, Portland Trailblazers, Starbucks, Swiss Re, Unilever, and
many more. The Declaration itself is directional and not as specific as
what Ceres and a subset of these signatories advocate for as part of BICEP’s work
(like pricing carbon and aggressive energy efficiency programs). But
it’s a very good start and demonstrates that the business community is
not against tackling climate change.
In related news, Accenture produced a fascinating survey
of 1000 CEOs around the world, in which a surprising 83% agreed that
government should play a critical role in enabling the private sector to
advance sustainability. And 31% even supported “intervention through
taxation.” In a world where business generally fights all regulations
and government interventions, it’s astonishing that one third of global
CEOs basically said, “tax us.”
7. Companies are aiming higher, for themselves and their
partners: Dell, Coca-Cola, Lego, and many more set very aggressive
environmental and social goals.
Goals are not the same as outcomes but they matter a lot – they set
the bar within sectors, driving competition and performance. As part of
its 2020 Legacy of Good Plan,
Dell said that it’s aiming to get a 10-fold multiple of good (reduced
footprint, for example) from its technologies versus the impacts of
making them (mimicking BT’s earlier 3:1 “Net Good” goal). More
specifically, the company pledged to reduce its greenhouse gases by 50%
and product energy intensity by 80%.
Coca-Cola launched its own 2020 goals
including reducing value chain carbon emissions by 25% (per drink),
recovering 75% of bottles and cans, and replenishing 100% of the water
the company uses. And Lego just announced its intention to use 100% renewable energy by 2016. A few companies have already made incredible progress, including Diageo, which, I reported earlier this year, cut its North American GHG emissions by nearly 80%.
In fact, 75% of the world’s largest companies now have multiple environmental and social goals in place (see my new website, www.pivotgoals.com,
a searchable database of 2500 environmental and social goals set by the
world’s largest companies). In addition, my research shows that more
than 50 of the top 200 companies have even set carbon goals in line with
PwC’s 6% per year reduction recommendation.
A few companies have begun to extend their goals to their suppliers, a
form of what I’m calling “de facto regulation.” Walmart is phasing out 10 toxic chemicals in the products on its shelves, and HP set a carbon reduction goal of 20% for its supply chain.
8. Sustainable companies are winning the talent wars: Unilever ranks 3rd in LinkedIn’s list of in-demand employers.
Just consider LinkedIn’s top 20 most in demand companies
(in order): Google, Apple, Unilever, P&G, Microsoft, Facebook,
Amazon, PepsiCo, Shell, McKinsey, Nestlé, Johnson & Johnson, BP, GE,
Nike, Pfizer, Disney, Coca-Cola, Chevron, and L’Oréal. The tech
companies make sense given the platform (and they’re cool brands). But
the rest are perennially in-demand employers, such as big consumer
brands and top destinations for MBAs (McKinsey) and engineers (Shell).
But what’s surprising is Unilever’s rank — for a company not nearly
as well known as the others, it came in just behind two of the hottest,
most valuable companies in the world, and ahead of much better known
brands like Disney, Nike, and Coca-Cola. Executives at Unilever credit
their ranking to the company’s known leadership on sustainability. It’s
hard to argue the point.
9. Systems innovation starts to take root: NIKE, NASA, USAID, and the Department of State create LAUNCH.
LAUNCH is an initiative to
identify and accelerate innovations that help solve global problems with
water, health, energy, waste, and systems. This program is new so it’s
unclear what the impact will be, but it’s an interesting and indicative
story for two reasons.
First, look at the partners — what a weird,
wonderful mix of business, government, and scientific organizations.
Second, the goal is really systems change, and if we’re going to solve
the mega challenges in our midst, we need to work across value chains
and traditional lines.
10. Better tools for companies to assess “materiality” get closer: SASB releases its first sustainability accounting standards.
The Sustainability Accounting Standards Board has been plugging away,
drawing together executives from the world’s largest companies to
develop the right sets of questions – specific to each sector – that
will help leaders identify which environmental and social issues are
really material to their business. We’re very early in this journey, but
SASB produced the first set of guidelines for one sector (health care). Watch this space.
2014 and Beyond
- Will the divestment movement
continue to gather steam and put significant pressure, either financial
(unlikely) or moral (much more intriguing), on fossil fuel companies?
- Will all the talk about building a circular economy gain mainstream acceptance?
- Will we get better at valuing natural capital (and will companies
and markets care)? It certainly garnered lots of attention this year,
with new estimates of the damage the global economy does to natural assets (trillions), new tools to measure natural capital, and an important new book from former Goldman partner and CEO of The Nature Conservancy, Mark Tercek.
- Can challenges to our consumption-driven model go gain currency?
Patagonia continues to launch programs like its Responsible Economy
initiative and a backlash to Black Friday, “Worn Wear,” which suggests that we should enjoy what we already own.
- Will the resilience push take hold? New York City released a $20 billion plan
to get the city ready for more extreme weather — will companies embrace
the risk-reduction benefits of different thinking and planning?
- Finally, why haven’t more companies followed some of the recent
sustainability leaders? Paul Polman at Unilever stopped providing
quarterly guidance a few years ago so the company could focus on real
value creation. And Microsfot and Disney remain really the only two big
companies charging their own divisions a carbon fee (yes, as CDP
recently reported, and the New York Times put on the front page,
29 large companies now use some kind of internal pricing for
carbon. But most of these are “shadow prices,” in use for years, not
actual fees. Why has the pace of change lagged the urgency of our mega
challenges? Will more than a small number of companies embrace a much
deeper change to business as usual?
So it’s been a mixed year, as I suppose all years are, but I remain
optimistic that greater stories of change are coming. Have a very happy,
healthy, and sustainable 2014!
Andrew Winston is the co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of Green Recovery. His forthcoming book, The Big Pivot,
will be released in April. He advises some of the world’s biggest
companies on environmental strategy.
What do billionaires have in common? What is it that they do
better than anyone else? Why do we admire them, or their companies’
products and services, so much?
I’ve spent some time trying to identify common traits in the Forbes list of billionaires
and other similar lists of the world’s wealthiest. I’m particularly
interested in finding patterns in the types of people whom I respect.
It’s less about all that dough they’ve accumulated than about better
understanding how and why they made their fortunes.
It turns out there are many ways to make a billion dollars: real
estate, investing, gaming and entertainment, retail, technology, and
good old-fashioned inheritance. But the most interesting (and most
respected) businesses and personalities are also the ones with the
strongest and most authentic purposes behind them. My business partner, Mats Lederhausen,
was one of the first advocates I knew of purpose-driven business and
entrepreneurship. I credit Mats with helping me understand that purpose
is neither something soft nor something overly lofty. Instead, purpose
is the bigger why of a business. All of us understand the what of any successful business, but what about the why?
While billionaires and their companies are bucket companies by
industry (i.e. the what of the company), I believe that there are three
categories of purpose that are interesting to observe, and consider
which one dominates your company’s mission. Here they are:
1. Making the world more beautiful.
2. Making the world more fun.
3. Making the world more efficient and smart.
1. Making the world more beautiful. These are the
people who make us look, eat, and live more beautifully. It is a broad
definition of outer and inner beauty. The best are able to make us look
and feel good. The beauty category of billionaires includes the
larger-than-life fashion figures of Ralph Lauren, Bernard Arnault (of
LVMH), and recently minted billionaire Tory Burch.
It is actually quite amazing to see how many of the world’s richest
come from the fashion, retail, and design worlds. And then there are
those who aren’t explicitly in the design, style, or beauty business but
nonetheless identify strongly with these themes. Apple, of course, is
the poster child for this ethos, as it puts design first for everything
from its software to the industrial engineering of products. For Apple,
it is not just design that matters — what’s paramount is using design to
connect to the user.
Beyond beauty sensed with our sight and touch, there are the founders
in this category who have focused on our inner beauty and health.
Indeed, there are people like Hamdi Ulukaya (the Turkish founder of
Chobani Greek Yogurt) or the founders of a variety of biotech and
pharmaceutical firms who have achieved this through focusing on the
purpose of healthier ways for us to eat and live.
2. Making the world more fun. One name that springs
immediately to mind is Richard Branson. His mission and purpose center
around fun and play. Disney is another icon that has redefined the
entertainment experience. But perhaps my personal favorite of a
billionaire founder who has spread his creative fun around the world is
Cirque du Soleil founder Guy Laliberté. Making the world more fun is
noble and creates greater happiness for us all. The billionaire founders
who get this and who have succeeded in doing so help to put more
smiles, more laughter and yes, more fun into a world that is too often
dull and mundane. Fun is a good business model — and it does not need to
be a billion-dollar enterprise. It is perhaps because it is relatively
easy to think of small ways to create fun that it is even more
impressive when people such as these are able to scale fun on a massive
level.
3. Making the world smarter, more efficient, and more relevant.
There are more “knowledge workers” today than ever before. In this
world, we have all become familiar with the technology and Internet
moguls (e.g. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page) who
have helped to make us smarter, faster and more efficient in our daily
lives. Doing work via shared Google Docs versus a word processor versus a
typewriter — yes, we’ve come a long way. The connected social economy
and its companies like Facebook and LinkedIn are all about how we can
try to do more, faster. That is, these companies allow us to have more
communication moments in ever-shorter time segments. And there are also
information and media moguls, like Mike Bloomberg or the Thomson family
behind Thomson Reuters, who dominate financial and legal information,
respectively, and are viewed as being mission critical to professionals
in those fields.
As these firms enable more, faster, and smarter
throughput of information, a challenge will be to maintain relevancy. As
more and more information is thrown at us, we are now ironically often
seeking less and less of it. And this is perhaps what the next great
wave of tech and info billionaires will address — as curators whose
purpose will be to find greater meaning, context, and relevancy in this
mass information world.
So, while there are many ways to make money, there tend to be some
common patterns of higher purpose. The three purposes illustrated here
help explain why and how some of the world’s wealthiest have have gotten
so rich, and made our lives richer as well. These three purpose
categories likely blur at times, and certainly co-exist in terms of the
culture and value propositions of the truly great companies. But the
take-home lesson is to ask yourself which of these purposes you are
willing to strive to become the absolute best at. Companies and founders
that make a singular and unwavering commitment to excel along any of
these three purpose dimensions not only have the chance to make our
lives better, but also to leave an imprint on our culture, on how we
view and experience this world. That, and they might just end up as
billionaires.
