IFNONCOUVSA T I O N
TURNING PURPOSE INTO PROFIT Scott Langley shares how the Japanese concept of ikigai can and should be applied to our approach to business.
W
e have been lied to. Perhaps you were lied to with the best of intentions. Maybe you were lied to by people who loved you deeply. Chances are, they were trying to keep you safe and protect you from a life of scarcity or even poverty. But it was still a lie, nonetheless. In essence, we are sold the lie growing up, in one form or another, that we need to find some way of making money and that this is the most important thing. Find a job that pays the bills. The end. I believed this lie for many years. And as an idea, it certainly has a lot of merits, especially in times like this. Nobody would look down on someone who takes a job to provide for their family. But apart from the financial compensation, I wonder what effect that this ‘job that pays the bills’ will have on the person’s overall state of being after two or three decades when it is not aligned with who they are. What does a job like that do to a person’s mental health when it is not aligned to their values and solving problems they see in the world? Or worse, when that job plays a role in causing some of the world’s most significant issues? What does it do to their motivation, attitude and team spirit when it’s not in sync with their passions, gifts and talents?
PUTTING NUMBERS TO IT A study of 50 years of Gallup Poll data on the topic of leadership, which included more than 20 000 in-depth interviews with senior leaders, 10 000 employees and more than one million work teams, showed some disturbing data. “In the workplace, when an organisation’s leadership fails to focus on individuals’ strengths, the odds of an employee being
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