MISC: Purpose by MISC

a journal of strategic insight and foresight VOL. 27 2018 $12 USD $15 CAD £7.50 GBP DISPLAY UNTIL 3/31/2018

Becoming a Purposeful Leader P. 14

Dinner With a Purpose P. 54

The Business Case for Purpose P. 60

Crafting a Raison D’Etre P. 82

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Publisher

cognizant.com

ideacouture.com

As co-publishers of MISC, our aim is to provide a new level of understanding in the fields of insight and foresight. We navigate the blurred boundaries of business, design, and innovation through in-depth articles from some of the preeminent voices of design thinking, technology, customer experience, and strategy. Idea Couture is a global strategic innovation and experience design firm. It is the innovation unit of Cognizant, and a member of Cognizant Digital

Business. We help organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments. We use design thinking methodologies to solve problems and exploit business opportunities – generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value. By taking an insight and foresight lens to our explorations in MISC, we can thoroughly examine the impacts and opportunities for change in a vast range of industries, allowing businesses to plan for the present and the future.

Some students enroll to become professional futurists, while others seek to bring a foresight perspective to their current careers. Students have three major areas of focus: understanding the future, mapping the future, and influencing the future, blending theory and practice to prepare graduates to make a difference in the world.

uh.edu

The University of Houston’s Foresight Program offers a Master’s Degree in Foresight, a four-course Graduate Certificate, and a week-long intensive bootcamp overview, each of which prepares students to work with businesses, governments, non-profits, and others to anticipate and prepare for the future. Established in 1974, it is the world’s longest-running degree program exclusively devoted to foresight.

kaospilot.dk

Kaospilot is an international school of entrepreneurship, creativity, and leadership. It was founded in 1991 as a response to the emerging need for a new type of education – one that could help young people navigate the changing reality of the late 20th century. The program’s main areas of focus are leadership, project management, creative business, and process design. Promoting a hands-on approach, case

studies are replaced by immersing students in real projects with real clients. Out of more than 600 graduates, one third have started their own company, NGO, or other similar initiative, the remaining hold management positions. Kaospilot also offers a wide range of courses for professionals in creative leadership and educational design.

cedim.edu.mx

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, CEDIM takes a design, innovation, and business comprehensive approach to education. Design is promoted as a core philosophy, and the faculty consists of active, young, and experienced professionals who have expertise in a broad range of fields. Students are engaged with real and dynamic work projects, and are encouraged

to immerse themselves in these active projects in order to participate in the realities of the workforce long before graduation. As a result, students at CEDIM develop an extensive sensitivity to their social, economic, and cultural environment, and go on to make real, pragmatic change in the world of design and innovation.

izational change, students in the program address the complex dilemmas of contemporary society. This interdisciplinary program interweaves design and foresight methods with social science, systemic design, and business, while providing the skills and knowledge to identify critical issues, frame problems, and develop innovative and humane solutions to better implementation plans.

ocadu.ca

OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (SFI) can claim a place at the leading edge of pedagogy and foresight practice. The SFI program is creating a new kind of designer – a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective, rethinks what is possible, and imagines and plans a better future. Recognizing the increasing importance that design thinking can play in positively impacting society, enhancing business success, and managing organ-

Co-Publishers Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Idris Mootee

Theory, So What? 6

Publishing Advisory Council Alan Alper Scott Friedmann Dr. Andy Hines Will Novosedlik Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius

Insight, So What? 8 Signal, So What? 10 Three Secrets to Help You Become a Purposeful Leader 14 Applying Science to Purpose 42 Why Your Company Needs a Purpose 50 Dinner With a Purpose 54 The Business Case for Purpose 60 Special Feature: Crafting a Raison D’Etre 82

Head of Media & Publication Ashley Perez Karp Managing Editor Esther Rogers Media & Publication Manager Mira Blumenthal Senior Editor Taylor Dennis Additional Editing Dominic Smith Art Direction / Design Sali Tabacchi, Inc. Additional Design Jemuel Datiles Illustration  Jennifer Backman

On the Origins of Progress 114 Experience 143

Distribution (US/Canada) Disticor International Distribution Pineapple Media Subscription Enquiries subscription@miscmagazine.com Letters to the Editor letters@miscmagazine.com Contribution Enquiries contribution@miscmagazine.com Advertising Enquires advertising@miscmagazine.com Canada 241 Spadina Avenue, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5T 2E2

MISC is a publication by

United States 649 Front Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94111 United Kingdom 85 Great Eastern Street London, EC2A 3HY United Kingdom Corporate Office Cognizant Digital Business 500 Frank W Burr Boulevard Teaneck, NJ 07666

Contributing Writers Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar Charles Andrew Lena Blackstock Robert Bolton Robert H. Brown Juliana Ciccarelli Nic Connolly James Elfer Lee Fain Scott Friedmann Dr. Cindy Gordon Dr. Paul Hartley Dr. Andy Hines Dr. Fiona Hughes Stephanie Kaptein Michele Likely Tom Masterson Will Novosedlik Maya Oczeretko Ronnie Pang Kuhan Perampaladas Ben Pring Kareen Proudian Anna Roumiantseva Paul Rowan Jac Sanscartier Shane Saunderson Alexis Scobie Dr. Maya Shapiro Dominic Smith Dr. Michelle Switzer Sam Venis Kishan Wadhia Dr. Ted Witek Hilda Yasseri Lily Zhang

MISC (ISSN 1925-2129)  is published by Cognizant Digital Business. All Rights Reserved 2018. Email misc@miscmagazine.com The advertising and articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors. We are  not to be held accountable for unsolicited manuscripts, artworks or photographs. All material within this magazine is © 2018 Idea Couture Inc.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Contents

Cognizant Digital Business recognizes the coming convergence of new technologies – automation, the sensor-enabled world, AI, 3D printing, etc. – as well as the shifting demographics, expectations, and regulations that are creating a context for a new age of business. Cognizant Digital Business brings together digital strategy, deep industry knowledge, experience design, and technology expertise to help clients design, build, and run digital business solutions. The practice provides managed digital innovation at enterprise scale which includes services around Insight, Foresight, Strategy, Ideation, Experience Design, Prototyping, and a Foundry where pilot programs are moved to enterprise scale.

Disruptive innovation may have been born in Silicon Valley and coined in Boston by Clayton M. Christensen, but it has now spread to every corner of the world and extended to every industry. To catch up with the breakneck pace of innovation, companies put frenzied efforts into becoming more agile, employing a human-centric approach to design, and creating labs to push the boundaries of industry definitions and the human imagination. There is a big premium placed on business creativity, human empathy, and speed. But in the process of speeding up and deploying the latest technologies, companies forget why they are doing this in the first place. What they need is a purpose – any massive transformative effort requires one, and so does every company. In any organization, purpose needs to engage all levels of employees and stakeholders. They need a “Mega Transformative Purpose” (MTP) to drive a new level of human performance that goes beyond seeking profit. The blind pursuit of profit, after all, is simply a distraction. An MTP needs to be more than just a large mission statement. Tesla and Google, for example, rely on this release of energy to power their organizations in order to achieve nearimpossible goals. We like to use words like “vision,” “mission,” and “purpose” frequently – but do we really know what they mean and how they are similar or different? These three words operate at different levels. A vision statement is a declaration of an organization’s objectives and should describe what type of business the organization is (and isn’t), both now and projecting into the future. Its aim is to provide a sense of focus for strategic planning, informing much of the business strategy and operational planning. It does not serve to answer the “why,” but is instead future- and goal-oriented. A mission statement helps the company set a direction for its behavioral compass. An example would be, “To make the process of buying a home simple, efficient, and stress-free for both the buyers and sellers.” This takes the outward focus further, not only emphasizing the importance of customer centricity, but also putting managers and employees in charge of constantly improving customer experience. It centers on the question: What are you doing for your customers? So how does a company’s purpose differ from its vision or mission statement? An MTP statement is about finding a bigger reason why a company should exist. Steve Jobs’ version of purpose for Apple was: “To make a contribution to the world by making tools for the mind that advance humankind.” This motivating and engaging model connects with both the heart and the mind. Every person, team, and organization needs a reason for being, or else we risk not knowing what we’re actually doing, let alone why we’re doing it. This matters even more when going big. Our purpose does not serve our mission – it helps us to create it. When you have a rock solid MTP, there is no stopping where you will go. We dedicated this entire issue to the topic of purpose for this very reason. In “The Business Case for Purpose,” Will Novosedlik explores why it’s time for companies to change their fundamental behaviors. In “Building a Better Bot,” Dr. Angelica Lim talks about the need to design social robots with the core purpose of human interaction. And in “Dinner With a Purpose,” we present a menu where every item is influenced by the role it may play on our plates in the future. Finally, our special feature, “Crafting a Raison D’Etre,” brings perspectives from the leaders of five different organizations, ranging from large and established corporations like PepsiCo and Shopify, to newer players like Slice. Purpose is essential; it’s what gives people a reason to get up in the morning. And it’s those same people who are giving life to companies. After all, what is a company without people? And what are people without purpose? I hope this issue will inspire you to start the journey to find your purpose.

Idris Mootee Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Global CEO / Idea Couture

Organizational transformation is like a rite of passage. Whether it’s about embedding new capabilities, integrating an acquisition, or introducing new technologies, organizational structures, or KPIs, during any organizational transformation there will be a liminal period in which the organization is no longer what it was, but not yet what it will be. In the context of ritual rites of passage, the outcomes are well known; the sense of ambiguity has an end because the purpose of the transition is an objective that is known and shared by all members of the community. But what happens when the outcomes of a transition are not understood or shared by those undergoing the change? What happens when a transformation isn’t underpinned by a shared sense of purpose? Betwixt and between old and new structures, functions, and roles, the social underpinnings of work can become unmoored from the work itself. When employees are aligned to a common goal, the stress of change can bring people together through solidarity and communitas. In this scenario, employees are engaged in the delivery of shared outcomes. However, when outcomes are not clearly defined, the suspension of the existing order can work to transform solidarity and communitas into a toxic territoriality, where employees vie for positions and focus more on personal power than on achieving a common goal. When the ambiguity of change impacts the experience of work for employees, business outcomes can suffer.

Learning From Liminality The Importance of Purpose During Organizational Change

B Y D R. E M M A A I K E N - K L A R

Whether it’s the first day of kindergarten, the start of a new job, puberty, or retirement, change – even when it is welcomed – tends to be challenging to cope with. It’s no wonder that organizational change is typically considered a painful experience. While complex constellations of factors underpin any organizational transformation, the anthropological notion of liminality offers an interesting perspective on the human experience of organizational change. Anthropologists use the term “liminality” to describe the sense of chaos and ambiguity that a social group endures during a time of transition. Coined by Arnold van Gennep in 1909, and then taken up by Victor Turner in 1967, the term is used to understand the point that occurs during a rite of passage when we are no longer what we were, but not yet what we will be. Liminality is that point in a transformation when we are “betwixt

and between”; the structures that maintain social order fall away, and new forms of organization emerge once the transformation is complete. During the liminal phase of a rite of passage, members of the social group experience a strong sense of social solidarity, known as communitas. This feeling of social connection is a key part of a successful transformation. Ceremonial rites of passage are able to bring about effective transitions because they represent change that is underpinned by shared culture and beliefs. Everyone knows the outcome of the transformation before it happens, so liminality is largely performative in ceremonial contexts. The transformation is catalyzed through the strong leadership of a ceremonial master, and the ambiguity and chaos is temporary because people share a belief that the outcome is a necessary part of life. In other words, rites of passage turn out well because culture underpins the change with a sense of purpose.

PHOTO: BEASTY

Theory, so what?

In this regular feature, we pick a social theory, explain its relevance to everyday life, and then explore how the theory’s implications could impact the future of your business, industry, or category.

So What? Applying Liminality to Organizational Change

// Anthropologists use the term “liminality” to describe the sense of chaos and ambiguity that a social group endures during a time of transition. //

Applying the theory of liminality to the human experience of organizational change offers new ways of thinking about business transformation: / Beyond what is changing and how the change is being activated, do leaders and team members share an understanding of the deeper purpose of why change is happening and how organizational life will differ when it’s done? / Successful rites of passage are catalyzed by a ceremonial master who leads participants through the period of liminality. Who is emceeing the transformation in the organization and making sure all participants know what comes next? / Ritual rites of passage are underpinned by shared cultural beliefs and practices. What are the cultural beliefs and practices within the organization that will either help or hinder the change the business is trying to achieve? / The ritual experience of liminality is mediated by a shared understanding of what change means. What is the narrative around change in the organization, and how can this story be used to motivate and support the experiences of employees? / During liminal periods, the social order is suspended. Similarly, during a corporate transformation, roles and responsibilities will likely be changed. What actions can be taken by leadership and management to ensure that the experience of change is characterized by a sense of solidarity and communitas, rather than resentment or envy? / Does the organization have the appropriate communications structure, channels, resources, and content to support employees as they move through the liminal phase of organizational change? / How might design thinking be applied to the employee experience of change to help embed purpose into the transformation and drive better outcomes? //// Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar is VP, human insights at Idea Couture.

Living in the information age has made people hyper-aware of the world’s problems. They are eager to become part of the solution by engaging in everything from low-commitment “clicktivism” to the radical restatement of their life’s purpose. While this doesn’t mean individuals will completely change their way of being, it does mean that they are more willing to engage with brands that make it easier for them to increase their social credibility. Consumers are forming relationships with brands based not only on the quality of their products and services, but also on their core values. Taking a stance gives brands the opportunity to strengthen their relationships with consumers by actively working together on issues that matter. Consumers don’t want to stand aside and be talked at; they want to be involved in the conversation. By working together toward a shared purpose, companies are redefining the provider–consumer relationship –

a relationship now based on co-creation and collaboration. As consumers interact with brands in these new ways, they expect companies to live according to their values in everything they do. Beyond the single movitator of profit, brands are expanding their bottom line to include people and the planet. Only by redefining the metrics of success can organizations make real progress toward environmentally sustainable and ethical processes. A clearly defined purpose motivates not only consumers, but also employees toward a common goal. A company doesn’t have to be a non-profit or social venture to create an environment where employees feel like their work matters. As boundaries blur between people’s private and professional lives, more individuals will come to crave a meaningful association with the work they do. Workers increasingly want their work to be a part of what defines them – it should represent their competencies, interests, and values, and it should go beyond their day-to-day responsibilities.

What If…

Purpose-Driven Companies BY STEPHANIE KAPTEIN

Overview Companies are using their influence to lead culturally relevant conversations that align with their brand’s core values, but are not directly related to their industry. Sustainable and ethical supply chains are no longer negotiable; instead, they are expected by consumers. This is prevalent in the fashion industry, where consumers are demanding a higher standard for an industry notorious for its environmental impact and mistreatment of workers. Fast-fashion retailer Zara recently experienced this first hand when angry consumers demanded to know why workers were not compensated after a factory was abruptly shut down. Shoppers are voting with their wallets; if brands don’t live up to their expectations, boycotting is a real possibility. Beyond complying to the bare minimum ethical and environmental standards, purpose-driven brands are moving forward by addressing socio-political issues. While brands previously avoided involvement in public discussions around divisive issues to prevent polarizing consumers, they have started taking larger risks to strengthen their relationships with their ideal audience. For example, when President Trump requested to

review 27 of America’s national monuments, outdoor clothing and gear company Patagonia directly confronted the president with a television ad discussing the need to protect America’s public lands. While there is a clear connection between an outdoor company taking a stand on environmental issues, other cases are not as intuitive. Seventh Generation, for example, which sells plant-based cleaning products, has placed their purpose before their profit by encouraging consumers to line-dry clothes instead of machine drying – all at the risk of cannibalizing their own sales of dryer sheets. Thanks to their higher purpose of nurturing the health of the next seven generations, they have become a top employer of millennials while also gaining a loyal consumer base. As brands have gained more cultural influence, their support of social issues has drastically broadened beyond their own domain. The Ben & Jerry’s website includes a full page on issues the company cares about, including fair trade and climate justice, but also marriage equality and peace building. They have actively shown their support of Black Lives Matter by issuing a seven-point list on how systemic racism is real – at the risk of boycott by Blue Lives Matter, a pro-police movement. By moving civil rights forward with their consumers, Ben & Jerry’s has strengthened their relationships through a common purpose.

PHOTO: MY LIFE THROUGH A LENS

Signal, so what?

In every issue, we highlight a weak signal and explore its possibilities and ramifications for the future of your business, and how to better prepare for it.

So What?

Personal

Brand

Organizational

/ Nielsen found that 66% of global respondents said they were willing to pay more for products and services that come from companies committed to creating a positive social and environmental impact.

/ 85% of companies with a clearly articulated and understood purpose showed positive growth in the past year, while 42% of companies that were not purpose-led showed a drop in revenue, according to Imperative and LinkedIn.

/ If employees feel they are working toward a good cause, it can increase their productivity by up to 30%, according to the Center for Economic Studies.

/ Consumers want to collaborate and co-create with purpose-driven brands. How might your organization create a compelling narrative that propels consumers to action toward a common purpose?

/ Successful organizations understand the “why” of what they do. How might your brand incorporate people and plant into the bottom line? What would your ideal world look like?

/ You can’t force employees to share your purpose. How might your organization design a recruitment process that identifies potential employees who share the same values and purpose? ////

Stephanie Kaptein is a foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

B Y D R. M AYA S H A P I R O

The Ask

Unpaid caregivers make up an emerging market that spans most industries. The number of people who assist, accompany, provide for, love, share with, or otherwise support their (mostly) elderly relatives or friends who live with acute or chronic health conditions has been rising steadily throughout the world, inspiring a wide range of products and services that cater to the needs of those who have responsibilities of care. And yet the notion of care is barely understood; on the one hand, care is treated as a set of purely mechanical tasks that must be completed and checked off a list, while on the other hand, it is seen as a psychologically fraught emotional experience that is too intangible and too personal to adequately understand. The same faulty assumptions prevail on both sides of this spectrum. First, the caregiver is seen as burdened with the task of providing care; in this conception, they must fulfill this responsibility at great cost to their own wellbeing. Second, it is assumed that all caregivers are focused on a singular purpose: keeping the person for whom they care alive, independent, and even “productive” for as long as they can. Products and services for caregivers respond to these imagined needs. They aim to ease the burden of caregiving tasks by providing tips, tricks, and devices that will keep caregivers and their loved ones as independent of one another as possible, and as happy, self-realized, and purpose-driven as can be managed under the circumstances. But caregiving can be understood in fuller, more nuanced ways. More importantly, it must be better understood if organizations are to respond appropriately to the growing need for caregiver support. There is a large and ever-growing body of research in the overlapping fields of anthropology, sociology, and gerontology that explores and elaborates on what we know and imagine about unpaid (sometimes called “family”) care. Specifically, social scientists have challenged the notion that the main goal of caregivers is to uphold rational, equal, and mutual exchanges with the person for whom they care. Such research questions whether a caregiver is really happiest when he or (most often) she can relate to her loved one in the same way that she relates to other people in her life. Researchers are even unsettling the notion that happiness, as we most commonly understand it, is a goal of care at all.

Recently, my anthropology team was tasked by a large US-based organization with reframing and refining a set of service offerings intended for caregivers, who make up a growing base of potential customers for other products and services that the organization provides. The organization was hopeful that improving their caregiving-specific services could help provide much-needed relief to caregivers while also attracting more people to their online and in-person sales events. With this goal in mind, we set out to understand the emotional journey of caregiving and the role that this organization could play in such a journey. Our fieldwork quickly taught us that the lenses of emotion and journey were both missing the mark. Not only did we find that caregiving is expressed as a social relationship that only partially takes place in the realm of emotion and the psyche, but we also heard repeatedly in each of the five cities that we visited about how caregiving is never a linear journey with clearly defined phases or a fixed and consistent purpose. By letting go of the idea of an emotional journey and recasting our exploration as one that sought out the social and relational elements of care, we were able to really hear what was coming out of our discussions with caregivers across the US.

PHOTO: SNAPWIRE

Insight, so what?

In every issue, we explore a topic through an anthropological lens in order to better understand its impacts on a wide range of industries.

When the Purpose Is the Process: Designing for Caregiving Relationships

The Insight

So What?

While the rhetoric around caregiving sometimes sets up an ideal of “giving of oneself,” our research uncovered that caregivers’ stories are less about “giving” than they are about becoming. Whether they see the responsibility of care as a result of destiny, duty, or divine providence, the caregivers’ sense of self becomes bound up in their acts of caregiving. In other words, care is not just what they do, but who they are. Furthermore, we saw caregivers’ persistent need to stay closely linked to the person for whom they care as part of a process of fusing one’s sense of self with the person who needs care. Although caregivers have considerable stress (over finances, the healthcare system, the pressure of decision making, and the grief of losing a loved one), most of them indicated that they were not eager to leave these responsibilities behind and were very reluctant to pay another person to do the work of care. This means that even as some caregivers said that they value the opportunity to engage in “self-care” (e.g. by going to an exercise class or having time alone), the fact that their wellbeing is intertwined with that of another person indicates that tools for caregiving support must be designed specifically for those relationships.

So often, strategic design principles are based around an individual, either as the point of departure or as a target market. But people – and the social situations they inhabit – do not have clear boundaries, around themselves or around the processes in which they are engaged. For all of their promises to use empathy in order to get to the heart of what is needed, innovators can be surprisingly blind to the empathy of the people for whom they design. This blindness is particularly unhelpful in service design for caregivers, as it is a world in which social interaction, empathic relationships, and the process of blurring the boundaries of the self are especially prevalent. By leaving aside familiar notions of rationality, independence, and the individual, those who design for care can provide solutions that operate better on the ground and – perhaps even more importantly – feel right to the people who are doing the difficult, complex, and important work of care. //// Dr. Maya Shapiro is a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

Owning Purpose

BY WILL NOVOSEDLIK

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

As the deleterious effects of neoliberal economics continue to pile up (income inequality, environmental degradation, job losses, increasing household debt, a shrinking middle class, a growing underclass, etc.), it’s becoming clear to many that the rules of the game need to change.

The stock market, which was meant to be a source of capital to be used for building businesses, creating jobs, and growing the economy, has instead become the playground of the 1%, who – through the mechanisms of deregulation and financialization – have managed to decouple Wall Street from Main Street almost entirely. At its most banal, financialization is defined as an increase in the size and importance of a country’s financial sector relative to its overall economy. In the US, for instance, the finance, insurance, and real estate sector in 2017 is responsible for a whopping 20% of GDP, compared to 10% in 1947, according to one article by Christopher Witko for The Washington Post. This much reliance on the financial sector for overall economic growth is believed by some scholars and politicians to be the main cause of our economic problems. In an increasingly financialized economy, the winners are the money managers and shareholders, whose incomes have grown at a far faster rate than those of most other skilled professionals. The losers are the middle and lower classes, who, as a result of all the negative outcomes mentioned above, are in no position to take advantage of the growth of the financial sector. With the increase of financialization comes a concomitant increase in political power and influence for the winners. This influence allows them to peel back or block any legislation designed to regulate the market, including taxation, environmental protection, and employee rights. It’s a zero-sum game wherein Main Street gets zero and Wall Street gets massive sums with which to protect and enrich itself. In response to these conditions, there are emerging economic models that promote the idea that instead of companies serving profit, profit should serve companies – and the communities and environments in which they operate. Purpose capital, impact investing, and benefit corporations are key examples of this. The Purpose Network is one such model. The Purpose Network helps mission-driven companies uphold a “legally binding

commitment to their employees and customers: that the company is not a speculative good or commodity but a group of people working for a purpose.” Their aim is to create, promote, and prove the effectiveness of alternative ownership and financing structures that challenge the growing centralization of capital and help shift our economic paradigm “away from profit maximization towards stewardship and purpose maximization.” The Purpose Network’s venture capital arm advises companies on how to implement “steward-ownership” and to achieve mission lock and long-term independence. In other words, it helps them stay out of the traditional stock market model and remain focused on the long term. For purpose-driven companies, the mission is the key priority, and profits are necessary in achieving that mission. This approach echoes the emergence of what is called the benefit corporation (also called a B Corp), which is a for-profit corporation committed to a triple bottom line of people, profit, and planet. Some 35 states in the US have enacted legislation that explicitly permits companies to pursue the triple bottom line. It’s a way of ensuring that a private, for-profit enterprise is also a social enterprise. As Dennis Tobin – a partner at Blaney McMurty LLP, a corporate practice in Toronto – recently wrote in a piece for The Globe and Mail, a corporation is a person in the eyes of the law. But unlike a flesh-and-blood human, it cannot be physically or spiritually harmed, which has resulted in the perception by many that a corporation “is an amoral actor, free to act without fear of punishment.” Under the aegis of shareholder primacy, publicly traded companies have been able to avoid responsibility and accountability for all kinds of immoral behavior, from tax evasion to environmental degradation. There are some shining examples to the contrary. Unilever is a leader in recognizing its social and environmental impact. More importantly, it refuses to submit itself to the tyranny of the quarterly report so that it may remain focused on the long game. Patagonia, Kickstarter, and Etsy are other examples of companies that have embraced the B-Corp model. But there are even older examples. Carl Zeiss AG, the German manufacturer of precision lenses, has been set up in a way that has protected it from becoming a slave to speculation since 1889. In this unique ownership structure, the Carl Zeiss Foundation is the sole shareholder of the for-profit Carl Zeiss AG. The shares are not listed on the stock exchange. The objectives of the foundation are “pursuing specific business activities of the companies, exercising special social responsibility, promoting the general interests of the optical and precision engineering industries, [and] supporting non-profit organizations at the locations of the Foundation companies.” Zeiss is living, 128-year-old proof that capitalism need not be a predatory, zero-sum game of winner takes all, but can thrive while being accountable to the society and environment in which it operates. Such a model defines ownership as stewardship, implying a commitment that goes beyond just milking the corporate cow for maximum shareholder profit and toward using the proceeds to fund long-term viability, robust employment, and a thriving Main Street economy. Given the ferocity with which Wall Street protects its own greed, we are not likely to see a sudden surge of interest in the Zeiss model. Until the incentives change, the behavior will only intensify. //// Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture.

IT ALL STARTS WITH YOU Three Secrets to Help You Become a Purposeful Leader

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

Where does great leadership begin? It’s obviously more than just experience, education, mentorship, inspiration, and vision. You need to look deeper than that and start with your very core. I am proud to have mentored some very successful CEOs, up-and-coming CEOs, and budding entrepreneurs, but I did this by looking inwardly too. Presented here are a few secrets from a lifetime of leading. Employees are happier and more productive when their leaders radiate energy – and energy is far more important than vision and strategy. Energy comes from a sense of purpose, not a false sense of confidence. When leaders display “purposeful” behaviors in how they communicate, push people to their limits, and even demand the near impossible, the outcome is a team of more satisfied, fulfilled, and committed employees who are willing to go the extra mile.

Great leaders don’t push people with limited short-termism, instead demanding only the best within the context of the organization’s purpose. Amazon is living proof of this. Over 23 years, it has grown into one of the largest internet retailers in the world. Today, Amazon remains relevant by keeping companies up at night thinking about which industry it is going to disrupt next. This is not a short-term minded company that simply gets lucky time and again. Under the leadership of Jeff Bezos, Amazon is poised to take on totally unexpected and wicked challenges with a long-term strategic view. Employees respond better to leaders who care not just about their next quarter earnings, but also about their wider community and society; leaders who have strong views of what the right thing to do is and who manage that with a deep sense of the collective aspirations of the company; leaders who behave with a “living” purpose. Bezos, for example, manages Wall Street and doesn’t let Wall Street manage him. Instead, he focuses on relentless growth along with the necessary inputs or actions required to deliver those objectives – purpose. How do we invest in the next generation of purposeful leaders? Let’s start with the assumption that it is impossible to mold all individuals into a uniform model of morals and ethics, and that we need to accept that there is not one single type of individual. The idea is not to have the perfect fit between individuals and organizations, but to support emerging leaders in navigating and negotiating the differences. Purposeful leadership goes hand in hand with inspirational qualities, including the ability (either born or acquired) for leaders to commit to a cause, to better themselves and the team, and to live their truest lives. In my experience, the ability to lead purposefully comes down to focusing on three commitments that have a massive impact on teams, organizations, and communities – and drive greater competitive engagement, differentiation, revenue, and profits. To compound this, the following points feature sidebars that extract from a recent executive 360-degree feedback report of myself from October 2017 prepared by an external consulting firm, which highlights my strengths and weaknesses. I am not suggesting that everyone should practice the same behaviors; they are included here purely for illustration or for your amusement, but most importantly, for transparency.

Know, admit, and accept who you are. You can’t be everything to everyone. If you try to make everyone happy, you will never achieve anything in life. You need to know your weaknesses and turn them into your strengths, rather than trying to overcome them or pretending they don’t exist. Deep down, you are that person, and your weaknesses are a part of you. Wear that persona on your sleeve. Leaders need authenticity; it needs to be seen in their actions. They shouldn’t speak through PR representatives or live a different life than what the public sees. Jeff Bezos’s true self was illustrated in his stewardship of The Washington Post and his personal handling of the return of Jason Rezaian, a Post reporter who was imprisoned in Iran for 544 days. Following Rezaian’s release, Bezos quietly met the reporter and his family in Germany to accompany them back to the US on his private jet. The event was quiet and tasteful – not an overhyped PR stunt. While Bezos has done many things that are not considered popular at Amazon, these are decisions that need to be made and, at the end of the day, his executives and managers respect him for making them. Idris’s Feedback: “[Your] patterns suggest you are goal-driven and achievement-oriented, and are likely to make decisions with urgency and timeliness, even when those decisions may not be ‘popular’ with others. You are also able to think unconventionally to create new and unique solutions to business problems. Many of your profile scores are typical of a person with very strong entrepreneurial leadership skills, and as noted earlier, this is clearly a key strength of yours.”

Every superhero has flaws. Become the best by not being perfect.

Shine your light on a chosen few. Jack Welch’s theory on talent management is well read and practiced by a generation of managers. The theory is that, on any given team, approximately 20% of the people are “A” players. These are the superstars: the cornerstones of an organization that others rely on to carry the mission forward. The next group is the “B” players, which comprises about 70% of any organization. These team members do the majority of the work and are competent and valuable. Many “B” players want to rise to “A,” and they need a path to get there. The remaining 10% are the “C” players, who take up a lot of time and energy, with no rewards. My approach to talent management is somewhat similar. First, you need to know who your stars are. The stars should not come from a particular experience level, as this traditional model puts too much weight on those with 10 or 20 years of experience, which is too limiting. These stars should not only be the best at what they do; they should also be able to conduct and radiate positive energy across the organization. A lone high performer is not enough. Stars should be naturals in directing their emotions, creativity, mental agility, thoughtfulness, empathy, efforts, and activities to achieve extraordinary results. Stars are the people who not only utilize intellectual power, but also organizational energy to achieve higher

performance – to the extent that their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral forces align constructively with the organization’s vision, purpose, and objectives. The primary job of purposeful leaders is to generate, release, and maintain the potential energy within the core of these stars and, by extension, the rest of the organization. Today, organizations need to breed cross-generational leadership. The definition of “A” players (or what I simply call “stars”) should come from all levels of the organization. Any successful company needs leaders from all levels. That is why I pick 5% of leaders from all levels and turn them into intellectual energizers. As a purposeful leader, your commitment is to find them and shine more light on them. Idris’s Feedback: “From a team leadership perspective, many of the raters commented on the value you bring as a teacher and mentor. Your market and knowledge, coupled with your strong passion for what you do, was described by many as being ‘energizing’ for your team. As one person noted, listening to you ‘is like taking a mini MBA course.’ People also commented on your ‘obsession’ for high-quality work, and your strong drive to push your team to go beyond ‘good’ to ‘great.’”

Don’t waste time on your weaknesses; maximize your strengths instead. Find people that complement you, cover for your weaknesses, and focus on leveraging your strengths. Many people have so-called “flaws,” with internal dialogues such as, “I’m an introvert and my leadership potential is limited,” or “I cannot handle any uncertainty and I feel too uncomfortable with not having a plan.” For the first one, you can turn it into a valuable strength by showing others that you’re a great listener and always taking the time to digest and observe before making any decisions. For the latter, your need to see a plan demonstrates that you are a methodological

thinker and a solid leader. I have helped many people successfully turn their weaknesses into strengths; it is a matter of coaching and will. There is no easy way to classify a strength or weakness, and many leadership tests are oversimplifications of these characteristics. A lot depends on the larger strategic and cultural context and the particular life cycle of an organization. In the meantime, dig out your flaws and nourish them. Find a time and place to use them. Some people, for example, are more suitable for a startup environment and some are more suitable for administrative roles. Even within a startup, you need clock-builders and clock-watchers.

If you know what the right place is for you to turn your weaknesses into your most powerful strengths, you are halfway to a very successful and happy career. Idris’s Feedback: “There are several patterns in your personality profile that are very consistent with the behavioral observations people commented on during the interviews, as well as some of your own self insights. Key among those patterns is a tendency to come across as intimidating, arrogant, and overreacting at times, taking assertive action without seeking input from others. A ‘self-reliant’ tendency is also present in your profile, suggesting you may at times overly promote your own ideas, and be dismissive of others’ inputs or contributions. […] People described you as having a low frustration index, noting that if you don’t respect a person’s ‘intellectual horsepower,’ you quickly lose respect for them. These observations are consistent with your self-insights, where you noted during our interview that your impatience is both a strength and a weakness, and that you don’t like working with mediocre people.”

Practice Makes (Im)Perfect Everyone is unique, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution to becoming a more purposeful leader. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk – you can try and model yourself after these leaders, but it won’t be genuine. Like these famous leaders, I have practiced becoming a leader daily and have worked through my own self-discoveries, grappled with my weaknesses, and ultimately arrived in my role in my own unique way. I may not be perfect, but that was never the point. There is no magic formula to copy, either. The only thing that can be replicated is the willingness to take the journey. Are you ready to start yours? //// Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

WITH THAT?

SLINKYS, VIAGRA, AND COKE

B Y N I C C O N N O L LY

Slinkys, Viagra, and Coke. Mention these three items out loud at the office or in an airport lounge, and you might be rewarded with an awkward glance or two. Mention them on the internet, and you might find that they share an interesting back story. While that story is not as sexy as the title of this article might imply, it is interesting and thoughtprovoking nonetheless.

A Functional Purpose When considering which experiences they could offer that would add value to a customerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life, organizations often think about a product or serviceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s purpose outside of enterprise-wide, identity-setting activities. Some questions an organization might consider include: / What does my product do? / What problem does my product solve?

PHOTO: SAMUEL ZELLER

/ Why would someone choose my product over another?

YOU DID WHAT WITH THAT?

AND COKE Generic questions lead to generic answers. While this initial exercise – which helps the organization define the strategy and purpose behind a product or service – is useful, it is not always reflective of truth and reality. When freed from organizational assumptions, engineers’ factory floors, middle managers’ spreadsheets, and designers’ dreams, a product is no longer defined by this strategy and purpose, but is instead defined by the use and function a consumer chooses to give it. A good product is one with a purpose that aligns with its function, meaning that the organization understood its consumers and created a purposeful product that met their functional needs. As you may have guessed by now, our three titular protagonists – Slinkys, Viagra, and Coke – were initially misunderstood by their creators and suffered from purpose and function misalignment. / Slinkys were originally intended to act as stabilizing bases for naval instruments, until someone discovered a naval instrument is no match for stairs. / Viagra was intended to help with heart disease symptom management, until it became apparent that the drug created manageable symptoms for men with erectile dysfunction. / Coca-Cola was originally created as a pharmaceutical product to help with headaches, indigestion, and other ailments, until a more lucrative opportunity presented itself. Product strategy and purpose don’t matter if a consumer doesn’t derive value from the product’s function. Good products have purposes that align with their function – but great products have functional purpose. Now, for the 21st-century modernists out there, here is an additional example: IKEA.

IKEA Hackers Though the blue and yellow Swedish manufacturing titan needs no introduction, the small group of crafty fringe fans – who get more from the company than standardized shelving units and cheap meatballs – might. A well-established IKEA subculture, the online IKEA Hackers community is composed of individuals who – you guessed it – hack IKEA furniture. While it might sound a little strange, this digital community is quite ingenious and practical. IKEA hackers re-engineer, modify, repurpose, embellish, and share IKEA furniture hacks, creating function and deriving value from a FRAKTA, a BILLY, or a MALM that might not have existed otherwise. Ironically, the company known for its savvy marketing techniques served the founder of the IKEA Hackers site with a cease and desist letter in 2014, citing trademark violation. Thankfully for hackers and IKEA fans worldwide, digital outcry swiftly followed, IKEA retracted their cease and desist, and IKEA hackers continued creating new functions for the company’s products. Generations of newly minted young adults, as well as budget-conscious shoppers of all ages, would likely agree that IKEA offers great-looking and accessible products for an attractive price. However, it also sells an experience – albeit a sometimes frustrating one. From its carefully designed showrooms to its digital style guides and DIY furniture assembly, IKEA instills in its consumers a sense of guided creation.

The ritualistic manner by which the store’s nearly one billion annual visitors walk through showrooms, pick out styles, and then build their own furniture can only lead to creativity, tinkering, and playful modifications. IKEA hackers derive and share a functional value that falls outside of the product’s stated purpose. Here are a few more examples of products with multifunctional purposes, for the skeptics out there:

/ Dishwashers and their double lives: used to steam fish. / Whipped cream junkies: used as a means to get high off nitrous oxide. / Vinegar vs. germs: used as a cleaning solution. / Boots and bar tricks: used as a means to remove a cork from a bottle of wine. / McDonald’s and the tourist: used for public restrooms and free wifi. Purpose, Function, and You In a world where purpose is playing a larger role than ever before – thank you, millennials – organizations should seek to create products with purposes that are malleable, hackable, and adaptable to users’ needs and desires: products with multifunctional purposes. Though IKEA has succeeded in creating such products, this almost seems more like a happy accident than a conscious organizational strategic imperative. Rooted in this creative process is a deeper understanding of consumers, their unique needs, and the problems they face; gone are the days where organizations could simply put out products that addressed assumed needs. Understanding consumers and finding their hidden functions for a product is the first step to building experiences with functional purpose. Customers are out there, and they have a function for your product. So, first ask yourself this: What are people using your products for? Then, once you have your answer, follow up with a more difficult question: Are you sure? //// Nic Connolly is a project manager at Idea Couture.

FORESIGHT

Foresight: + Houston Preparing

University of Houston College of Technology Foresight Program

Professional Futurists

FORESIGHT CERTIFICATE SEMINAR January 15-19, 2018 | Houston Apr 29-May 4, 2018| Houston

TO REGISTER: http://www.uh.edu/technology/departments/hdcs/certificates/fore/

A FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS IN THE PURPOSE ECONOMY

B Y M I C H E L E L I K E LY

Not being one for public displays of emotion, I am embarrassed to say that sitting in the pews of La Sagrada Família in Barcelona, bathed in the light created by the church’s multi-colored stained glass windows – and surrounded by hordes of tourists clutching tightly to selfie sticks – I started to tear up. The audio guide crackling in my ear told me that construction on the church had started in 1882, and yet I could still see cranes outside building the final spires. I felt simultaneously grounded in the past and tethered to the future.

The church is a visual narrative of Christ’s life, complete with 18 towers, 3 detailed facades, soaring stained glass windows, and bone-like columns that twist and branch toward the ceiling. Altogether, the church reflects a delicate symbiosis between natural form and Christian iconography. Antoni Gaudí began designing the structure in 1882, inspired by a far-reaching vision that extended well beyond his lifetime. Construction on the church is scheduled to wrap up in 2026. Remarking on his vision, Gaudí said, “It is not a disappointment that I will not be able to finish the temple. I will grow old, but others will come after me. What must always be preserved is the

PHOTO: ANDREY GRINKEVICH

T A

E H

R D

L A T

SEE IT

BUILD IT

Motivate Teams With Meaningful Work With their detailed blueprint in hand, the cathedral architect must next entrust their vision to the stonemasons, artisans, and engineers who will dedicate themselves to bringing it to life. No cathedral can be built by the efforts of one person alone; the world’s greatest cathedrals were built by generations of workers across varied disciplines, who could all clearly see how their work contributed to the greater purpose of the cathedral. Consider this popular parable: A traveler walks by two stonemasons working at a construction site. Intrigued, the traveler asks the first stonemason, “What are you working on?” The stonemason replies, grumbling, “I’m cutting stones to make a living.” The traveler nods, and then asks the same question to the second stonemason, who is working steadily and contentedly nearby. The second stonemason looks up and replies, “Can’t you see? I’m building a great cathedral.” For businesses struggling to respond to a new generation of employees looking for meaningful work, the story of the stonemasons demonstrates how cathedral thinking can drive purpose beyond the work itself. Moving employees from feeling like they are cutting stones to knowing they are part of building a cathedral requires a compelling articulation of how their everyday work contributes to realizing a greater purpose. This communication must be backed up by a new approach to performance management and evaluation that focuses on recognizing and incentivizing long-term, purpose-aligned mindsets and actions. In an interview with the New York Times, Alan Mulally, former CEO of both Ford and Boeing Commercial

generations of motivated workers to complete. For a concept that stretches back to the Middle Ages, cathedral thinking is remarkably relevant in today’s business context. Companies are facing pressure to adapt to an increasingly uncertain future shaped by rapid advances in technology and new disruptive players. At the same time, they are looking for ways to succeed in a purpose-driven economy where customers want and expect organizations to help solve some of the world’s most pressing social, environmental, and political challenges. Similarly, new generations of purpose-driven employees are looking for careers that allow them to become part of the solution. Cathedral thinking can be used by businesses as a transformational tool for imagining and planning for the future, infusing purpose into business architecture, and helping employees find meaning and motivation.

Establish a Long-Term, Future-Oriented Vision The first step to applying cathedral thinking to business is establishing a long-term vision that is grounded in an understanding of future possibilities. This not a typical corporate vision statement – it cannot be written by executives sitting in a boardroom imagining their desired future state in 5 or 10 years. Conceiving a business future with the same type of vision required to build a cathedral demands thinking that extends far beyond the next 10 years. Family-run businesses are particularly successful at this kind of long-term thinking – for executives who know that their children and grandchildren will feel the effects of today’s decisions, legacy is key. Visions that cast further into the future must be grounded in an understanding of how things may shift over time. You could say that all cathedral architects were foresight practitioners; they were able to articulate a vision that stood up to many possible future scenarios. For businesses, creating future-oriented visions requires developing corporate foresight capabilities. Shell, one of the pioneers of corporate foresight, has been using scenario planning to imagine and engage with an uncertain future since the early 1970s. Organizations that practice strategic foresight make use of richly imagined narratives of possible futures to challenge executives’ assumptions about the future and encourage a long-term approach to strategy. In a world of short-term quarter-by-quarter thinking, creating an ambitious vision that looks generations ahead requires executive leadership and courage. Only with these qualities can an organization be guided to break free from expediency in favor of more far-ranging thinking.

PLAN IT

Design a Business Built for Purpose Once a cathedral architect has a vision, they begin the process of designing the structure and creating blueprints to communicate their design to future generations. Every element of the design process is driven by the greater purpose of creating a physical structure that serves as a vehicle for connecting people to God. For La Sagrada Família, Gaudí designed the pinnacles on top of the towers to stretch to the sky, which symbolizes elevation toward God. He designed the twisting, branching columns to evoke a forest, inviting introspection and prayer. Believing that God was light, Gaudí incorporated arches, which elevated the ceiling and skylights to illuminate the church. How would businesses transform if each element of a business’s architecture were designed as purposefully as the pinnacles and arches of Gaudí’s masterpiece? An understanding of the fundamental purpose of a business should extend beyond a line in a strategic plan or a tagline in a new marketing campaign; it should inform strategy development, business process design, sourcing, relationships with customers, talent management, and evaluation frameworks. Together, the distinct elements of a business’s design serve as the blueprint for future action. Trying to build a business with environmental sustainability at its core? Start by incorporating sustainability criteria into evaluations. Building a business that will provide the best possible service to customers? The hiring processes established today create the people-focused teams that will realize your vision tomorrow.

PHOTO: ANDREY GRINKEVICH

CATHEDRAL THINKING IN PRACTICE

spirit of the work; its life will depend on the generations that transmit this spirit and bring it to life.” To capture this intention, he created blueprints detailing his design for a structure that he believed would connect people to a higher power. These blueprints have inspired generations of stonemasons, artisans, and engineers to work toward the realization of Gaudí’s vision over the past 135 years. La Sagrada Família is one of hundreds of impressive churches and cathedrals built over many hundreds of years, including St. Peter’s Basilica (120 years), York Minster (252 years), and the Duomo di Milano (Milan Cathedral) (approximately 600 years). Despite living in different places and eras, all of the architects who created these structures shared a similar approach – now coined “cathedral thinking” – defined by the act of undertaking a visionary long-term pursuit that requires decades of foresight, purposeful design, and

Airplanes, reflects on the perspective-shifting power of purpose in his career: “Is the airplane really about an airplane or is it about getting people together around the world so they can find out how more alike they are than different? And is a car about just a driving experience or is it about safe and efficient transportation, and your family, and freedom?” When business leaders can elevate the purpose of their company in this way, employees are able to uncover and connect with the meaning in their work. This makes them more engaged, more creative, and more willing to collaborate cross-functionally within a business. – Cathedral thinking has left us with inspiring structures that continue to captivate generation after generation. Incorporating a cathedral mindset can spark new life in businesses, provoking a shift from a focus on short-term shareholder wealth maximization to long-term shared value creation for multiple stakeholders – including those not yet born. With legal lives that stretch beyond any one person’s lifetime, businesses are in fact an ideal vehicle for taking on cathedral-sized challenges that require long-term, multi-generational action. Anchored in a vision that takes the long view, guided by a design for achieving purpose, and equipped with an interdisciplinary, intrinsically motivated team of builders, businesses can find new and more compelling relevancy in a purpose-driven economy. //// Michele Likely is an innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

Economy

Economy Flexibility Does Not Equal Precarity

The Gig Economy The Gig Economy Finding Purpose in Precarity

BY K AREEN PROUDIA N A N D D R. M IC H E L L E S W I T Z E R

In 2016, Gizmodo published an article highlighting the disconnect between gig-economy heavyweight Lyft and its employees. The article noted how Lyft had shared what it thought was a cute story about one of its drivers – the company praised a pregnant employee for continuing

A flexible work life should not mean a precarious life. Flexible work in the gig economy should be designed with the purpose of reducing precarity, not furthering it – particularly for those who are resorting to it by necessity rather than choice. The value of flexible work and its role in supporting people’s day-to-day subsistence also needs to be understood. This requires operating in the gray; while the gig economy teeters on the edge of systemic precarity for some employees, it still plays an important role in allowing people to navigate their own livelihoods. But this doesn’t mean that people should be reverting back to more traditional ways of earning a living. Oftentimes, by sacrificing job security, people actually create more opportunities for stability in other areas of life that require greater attention. Anthropologist Dr. Kathleen Millar illustrates just this in her work in Rio de Janeiro with catadores (those who make a living by collecting recyclables from the garbage dump). She found that many catadores choose to abandon more stable work to return to laboring in the dump, as it allows them to attend to “everyday emergencies” that arise from living on the margins. In less extreme circumstances, the flexibility of the gig economy can allow someone to earn a wage while also meeting the demands of caring for a dependent, such as an aging parent or a young child, when no other support is available. Moreover, the gig economy opens up an opportunity to rethink what it means to be a productive citizen in the 21st century. Following the Second World War, work became highly entwined both with people’s identities and their social lives. While some have argued that the end of the traditional Fordist-era labor structure has had negative consequences, such as the disappearance of social networks and an increase in situations of precarious labor, it could also be argued that this change has allowed for the emergence of new subjectivities that are less reliant on the notion of the “good capitalist worker.” The gig economy also allows those looking to commit their time to non-economic pursuits during established “office hours” to do so while also working to meet their basic needs. Thus, until society as a whole is capable of creating total stability for even the most vulnerable populations across all aspects of daily life (which, we argue, is the ultimate goal), the kind of flexible work provided by the gig economy actually serves as a necessary – albeit imperfect – solution.

The Gig Economy The Gig Economy

to work even as she went into labor. Bryan Menegus, the author of the Gizmodo piece, took issue with Lyft’s version of the story; he argued that perhaps the driver was less motivated to continue working out of a sense of commitment to or love of the job, and more out of economic necessity. What drove this woman to keep driving: economic need, dedication, or something else? So much of who we are and how we live is dictated by the careers we choose, but many of these careers are increasingly being disrupted by automation in manufacturing and other similar sectors. In response, members of the workforce are turning to odd jobs in the gig economy in order to supplement part-time work or otherwise take control of their employment situation. The gig economy is being touted as the savior of unemployment – but have we really considered its sustainability and longer-term purpose?

Leveraging the Gig Economy

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

The only way to ensure a sustainable livelihood for gig workers is to recognize and harness the two-way purpose of the gig market. As corporate competition increases within the gig economy, businesses within this emerging industry must differentiate themselves by offering true flexibility – not precarity. Only by providing such flexibility will organizations succeed in the future gig economy. This is best illustrated by Uber’s recent legal and financial troubles. According to a recent article in Time magazine, “Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees – with the attendant benefits – if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage.” The difficulty, of course, is navigating the fine line between necessary flexibility and dangerous precarity. The organization that is better able to understand not only the needs of the end

consumer, but also of the gig worker, will engender loyalty. By being invested in the fulfillment of these workers that are driving (literally, in many cases) their business model, gig creators will gain a sustained pool of workers to run their economy. It is incumbent upon the creators of this gig market to recognize the longer-term opportunity that they have to develop their workers/contributors in order to sustain their potential. This may be done by offering:

A New Method of Classifying Employees

While some will engage in the gig market for odd jobs and few hours, others will work “full-time” hours. Gig workers who work over an established number of hours deserve full-time employee status with the protection of certain benefits, and at least minimum wage, in order to guarantee a secure livelihood. The relationship between flexibility and temporariness is not one-to-one, and it should be recognized as such by gig employers. Workers should be given employee status if they maintain a certain minimum of hours.

Opportunities for Development and Advancement

Gig workers who are improving their skills while on the job are no different from other employees. These gig workers should be recognized for their increased skill level and should be given an opportunity for advancement through increased hourly wages or other benefits, such as discounted access to educational programs or apprenticeships. Consider the loyalty a gig employer would engender by offering their hardest working employees opportunities for employment advancement and, ultimately, recognition for their hard work.

Collective Support for Gig Workers

Gig employers and gig workers are not the only ones who can participate in this new marketplace. Other institutions – such as those in the financial services industry – should recognize the importance of the growing cohort of gig workers and their needs. Imagine, for example, the success of the first bank that recognizes the needs of solopreneurs and provides those unique workers with a new set of financial services products.

The gig economy has historically existed on the fringes of work, relegated to part-timers and free spirits, but the landscape has changed. There is purpose to be found within it, one that will ensure the longevity of companies providing this type of work while giving gig workers a better reason to get in their car and drive. //// Kareen Proudian is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture. Dr. Michelle Switzer is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

WRITE

WH HY WE

Exploring the Innate Purpose of Language

BY DOMINIC SMITH

PHOTO: JASON LEUNG

“There are many people thinking overmuch about the encroachment of colloquial and slangy speech upon good English.” — Arthur G. Kennedy The frustrated voice of Arthur G. Kennedy echoes through time, space, and the pages of the journal American Speech. His essay, “The Future of the English Language,” is as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1933. Ever since the English language was formalized through the

advent of the dictionary and filtered through a rigid education system, there has been a pretentiousness surrounding how “best” to use language. The hemming in of language by an institutionalized view of “good” English is much like the damming of a river – but I may be getting ahead of myself. With the rise in online content, the increasingly pervasive forms of advertising, and the sheer availability of words, the death knell of “good” English has once again been sounded by people in academia, business, and politics. However, the integration of technology into our daily lives, the explosion of the global population, and the ease with which we can communicate with people across the globe all have undeniable effects on the English language. As the landscape of language shifts on the tectonic plates of cultural change and the world becomes cluttered with words, the question becomes this: What is the purpose and value of well-constructed words?

Words Live in the Mind The answer remains the same as it always has: Words help us make sense of the world. But this isn’t in a mechanical sense of needing to know that a chair is a chair because it’s called a chair. Language’s main social purpose isn’t to facilitate mechanics – it is to articulate emotion. As Virginia Woolf so aptly explains, “Words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.” Language uncovers capital “T” Truths that would otherwise remain locked within us. For businesses and distributors of information, this means that in a world where readers are constantly consuming advertisements, news stories, and opinion pieces from a multitude of sources, it is vital that their content is emotionally engaging from the very first sentence. This is where the belief that language is being degraded becomes laughable. Language isn’t something that can be degraded through use. It exists as a societal orchestra, where the zeitgeist serves as the conductor, the competing voices of different social groups fill the four sections, and storytellers power the original composition. It’s for this reason that words, when used properly – “properly” being defined as capable of manipulating emotion – are of increasing, not lessened, importance.

The Global Growth of English The global population of English speakers has now surpassed two billion people, meaning that everything written has the potential to have a truly global audience. Moving forward, a business’s success will depend heavily on its ability to tap into people’s evolving use of language – and, more specifically, their use of English. The global growth of English and its use as the predominant language for online discourse has created an even greater need to create stories that are relevant across a range of different cultural frameworks – as opposed to spinning narratives centered on a solely westernized view of the world.

While English is almost certainly not going to become the sole global language, its increased use across the world has raised concerns regarding matters of culture and identity. However, the pervasiveness of the language could actually be used to some benefit: It could help repair the damage of economicsbased globalism. Over the past few decades, businesses and governments alike have been guilty of lecturing consumers and voters about how globalism benefits everyone equally. Opening up borders, we have been told, will create jobs and opportunities, and will result in completely fair and equal societies. The reality has of course been quite different. Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, wrote on this issue in 1996: “Economic globalization has entered a critical phase. A mounting backlash against its effects, especially in the industrial democracies, is threatening a very disruptive impact on economic activity and social stability in many countries. […] This can easily turn into revolt.” This warning went largely unheeded, and, over 20 years later, the backlash has sent ripples throughout the world. Or, as Schwab put it himself in 2017: “Today, we face a backlash against that system and the elites who are considered to be its unilateral beneficiaries.” This is where the power of storytelling has been completely misplaced and the increased literacy of readers has not been taken into account. Powerful entities like the UN, western nations, and conglomerates that use English as their primary language of communication have helped shape one very popular narrative. In this conception, both consumers and companies benefit from globalism: When the needs of businesses are put ahead of the needs of people, the argument goes, conditions for economic trade are improved, which ultimately benefits the public. Speechwriters, marketing managers, ad writers, politicians, and CEOs alike have constructed their institutions around stories of inevitable growth and progress, and these stories often feel as if they have been decimated down from on high. Sometimes, the language used is dumbed down to such an extent that it insults the intelligence of consumers; other times, the political-style, pseudo-intellectual spiel that politicians and CEOs have adopted as standard says very little, providing nothing more than a framework of exaggerated, intangible

promises that stand at a distance from the real-life struggles of ordinary people. It is the writers of the latter that often fall into the habit of vilifying the evolution of language. To solve for the disconnect between brands, politicians, and others in positions of power and their intended audiences, it is essential to understand that writing is itself a specialized skill; moreover, writing for specific mediums must be regarded as equally specialized. Hemingway didn’t write poems, Tennyson didn’t write novels, and the brand copywriters for Apple likely don’t write poems or novels. Writing is not a singular art form, and the ability to construct stories to suit a specific purpose and audience is one of the key differentiators between well-marketed businesses and those that miss the mark. Effusive, elegant prose – something that is all too often thrown out in favor of jargon – will grab the attention of readers looking to learn more about your business or read up on a complex topic; however, listening to overly complex, tell-don’t-show voiceover on a video simply won’t engage an audience that is astute thanks to the sheer amount of content they consume. Readers, viewers, audiences, voters, and consumers are simply people who want the language they encounter to connect with them emotionally – whether they are aware of that or not. Consumers need not be aware of their desires and motivations as they relate to the material they read, watch, and listen to – but the businesses and other entities crafting these narratives must have a solid understanding of this underlying purpose. As evidenced by human history, stories and the words used to tell them help people make sense of the world. It is not that language must only be used in a certain way; rather, each story needs to be powered by words that cut through the background noise that makes up people’s daily lives. Only in this way can a story strike a chord with the deeper elements of the human consciousness. The product, concept, or idea an organization is hoping to push through the content it creates should always be secondary to the need to engage the human side of that content’s audience. Language is natural to the human consciousness, and its purpose is as clear now as it was when Arthur G. Kennedy first criticized those who fail to see how the progress of language is natural to the human condition.

// IF FRESH WATER IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION, LANGUAGE IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF HUMAN EMOTION. //

Embracing the Flow of Language Language is like a coursing river. It is a powerful, earth-altering force that constantly erodes its own foundations – but in doing so, it nourishes itself. A river is never finished. Instead, it is pulled forward constantly by the unspoken force of gravity. There will always be people who attempt to impede its progress by putting up blocks and dams. But this progress is inevitable. Just as damming a river causes drought in one spot and flooding elsewhere, so too is holding back the flow of language a futile task. If fresh water is the lifeblood of human civilization, language is the lifeblood of human emotion. Words make us feel connected to the world around us. We build our personalities around them; they fix our broken hearts; and, when it doesn’t seem possible, they can make us fall in love all over again. Businesses, news outlets, and political parties should have one thing in mind when they are churning out content: The power of words can never diluted – no matter how abundant they are. So, whether you’re trying to sell products, persuade voters, or articulate an idea, the reins to the future are in the hands of the same people as they were in the past: great storytellers. //// Dominic Smith is an editor at Idea Couture.

OCAD University's graduate program in Strategic Foresight and Innovation is creating a new kind of designer: a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective and re-thinks what is possible; an innovator who can imagine, plan and develop a better world. Are you ready to embrace a creative future? Our graduate programs span the fields of art and design histories, criticism and curatorial practice, inclusive design, health, business innovation and foresight, digital media, and the studio art and design we’ve been teaching for 139 years. Find out more at: ocadu.ca/graduatestudies

EPIC on Perspectives

The Purpose of Perspective(s) BY: LENA BLACKSTOCK AND JAC SANSCARTIER DESIGN: JEMUEL DATILES ILLSTRATIONS: JENNIFER BACKMAN

Humans are messy. Our converging and diverging philosophies are all part of how we experience and create our world. We live in a world of differing opinions; this not only filters into how we solve for existing challenges, but also affects the paths we take to better understand our ever-changing world. As stakeholders in innovation, strategic insight and foresight, as well as design, we thrive when we are able to predict and respond to change. And many of us find purpose in our work by ensuring the focus remains on the human throughout it all, even if we take alternative approaches as we push toward that common goal. Our experiences, our language, and our stories are different – and thankfully so. So, if human centricity is the foundational purpose we all have in common, how might we apply the various ways in which we see and address change in order to achieve it?

EPIC is a conference that explores ethnographic research in business, bringing together practitioners from across the globe who want to ensure business innovation remains human centric. This year, the theme of EPIC was “Perspectives.” Participants explored the impact of having varying vantage points in ethnographic work, and presenters urged participants to consider other sight lines when constructing their practices. EPIC asks: What comes of widening or narrowing scope, acknowledging the shortcomings of our point of view, and finding inspiration in the outlook of others? How and why is this important? We asked six members of the EPIC community about collaborating with people who have different outlooks, their experiences with ethnographic research in the context of business, and what they think the future of contextual research might be. We talked about strategy within an innovation and design context, what signifies fast or slow research, and the relationship between humans and technology. Broad by nature, our questions and topics created space for our participants to bring in their own critical thinking, as well as their unique opinions and experiences. Here, we share ideas and reflections from these interviews in a set of three provocations, with each provocation featuring two different perspectives. By placing these streams side by side, we aim to present a less singular view of these topics, offering a dual line of sight even while working toward a shared goal. Please join us in exploring how these sometimes converging and diverging perspectives might provide value and propel us forward.

KEEPING IN MIND OUR SHARED PERSPECTIVES MIGHT HELP TO AND THE ASSOCIATED PAIR OF

PURPOSE OF HUMAN CENTRICITY AND HOW GUIDE US, THE THREE PROVOCATIONS WE INTERVIEWEES FOR EACH ARE:

MULTIPLE ARE EXPLORING

Provocation 01 What is the role of innovation strategy vs. design strategy when the goal is to achieve human centricity in our work? MARTHA COTTON DESIGN RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT FJORD

DR. SIMON P U L M A N - J O N E S GLOBAL DIRECTOR, INNOVATION STRATEGY AT GFK

Provocation 02 What are the benefits of slow ethnography vs. fast ethnography when the goal is to achieve human centricity? MICHAEL WINNICK CEO AT DSCOUT

DR. SIMO N R O B E R T S COFOUNDER & PARTNER A T S T R I P E P A R T N E R S

Provocation 03 What role does technology play in human centricity? DR. JEANETTE BLOMBERG PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST AT IBM RESEARCH

BILL S E L M A N SENIOR STAFF USER R E S E A R C H E R A T M O Z I L L A

Provocation 01 M A R T HA COTTON DESIGN RESEARCH A T F JORD

DIRECTOR

What is the role of innovation strategy vs. design strategy when the goal is to achieve human centricity?

I call myself a consultant. There’s UX, there’s user research, there’s design research, there’s design anthropology, there’s consumer insights. I am a consultant first. I work in consulting; I have clients. I have to help them make meaningful decisions based on what people care about.

STRATEGY

DR. SIMON PULMAN-JONES GLOBAL DIRECTOR, INNOVATION STRATEGY AT GFK

PERSPECTIVES

Design strategy is a way of problem solving and it’s going to look and feel a lot like design thinking. Design matters in business because designers have a way of problem solving and thinking about the world that others see the benefit of. It involves some key mindsets or behaviors, like making decisions driven by empathy. It’s a highly collaborative endeavor; it involves iteration and prototyping, learning and building. All of those, to me, are design principles.

Innovation thinking has a set of approaches that center around how to identify where a new set of benefit propositions can enter a category and create innovation platforms. Innovation work is all about innovation platforms, which are used to generate propositions. UX design work is more about making experiences work. It’s much more process-driven, using methods such as journey maps, interaction design, and others.

For me, innovation strategy is the problem to solve. Innovation has come to the fore because organizations recognize that they need to do something new in order to grow and compete. Innovation strategy is about whatever those new things are – and mobilizing your entire organization around that in order to be successful.

Historically, clients for those two types of work have been quite separate. But the split of work between UX and innovation teams has changed quite a bit over the last few years. Now, we’re consciously and increasingly blending [the two disciplines]. For example, consumer company’s products are becoming increasingly service-heavy. That experience will have to be designed through the lens of service design or experience design. At each stage, new propositions can be pitched that look at how people can do new things in new ways, for new reasons, and with new benefits. So now the combination of innovation thinking and design or process thinking is required.

Design strategists happen to be really good at innovation strategy because they’re trained to see the world differently and to understand that there is a mindset and process that goes into designing new solutions. Innovation strategy and design strategy are very closely linked, but that’s my articulation of what makes them different. MULTIPLE Humans are complex, so if you want to be human centric, you’ll be best served by bringing together a different set of disciplines and perspectives. The best teams I’ve worked on have a healthy mix of people who have different academic disciplines or came from different backgrounds. That mix of people results in really great work. Other people are going to ground their thinking in something that I’m not thinking about. Especially with a team of people with a variety of different perspectives, I ask to take time at the beginning of the project for people to explicitly think about their own backgrounds and their own view of the world. It’s a good way of laying the foundation for what we already know to be true and what we might be able to build on. I also like to push people out of their comfort zones and ask them to try and view the world differently, to try something new. Making an engineer go in the field and sit still during a three-hour interview is definitely putting that engineer out of their comfort zone, for example. This helps to potentially create a shift in their mindset, and that can be really powerful. FUTURE I do think that, given the permeability of design strategy, the discipline will grow, and it may morph into something that is indistinguishable from traditional strategy. But I think the negative feedback that design thinking has received [has had to do with a] perceived lack of action. There’s only so much investment that companies are going to make in design strategy, innovation strategy, and design thinking before they need to start seeing tangible results. That being said, I am really optimistic; I think it’s a very exciting time. And I hope five years from now it remains exciting and hasn’t turned out to be a flavor du jour.

I’m typical of people in my generation working in human-centered innovation in that I didn’t have professional training in this type of work. I came via a more accidental route that included documentary film making and anthropology. For me, the last ten years have been about taking ideas and approaches developed in boutique consulting and applying them at a much larger scale.

PERSPECTIVES [The convergence of innovation and design strategy] reflects a hybridization and improvisation, which is something I love about this type of work. It creates really interesting opportunities where we can benefit from the thinking of both sides. That’s what drives the creativity and value that a lot of us working in this industry can provide. There are also familiar challenges, such as territorial issues, that usually come with working in this world for a long time and working between research and design or sub-disciplines within design. For example, we have UX teams and innovation teams that both use ethnography as their primary way of engaging with people’s experiences. And so, when we need to do ethnography for a piece of work, both teams might say, “Well, that’s what we do.” But they’ll do it with a slightly different frame. The UX team would have more of a process, journey, and interactional approach to understanding how that experience might play out in context, and the innovation team might have an approach that looks more at how this experience might fit in with other experiences that are providing meaning within a certain aspect of people’s lives.

PERSPECTIVES I think the most significant transformation at the moment is the disruption of research and business information by passive behavioral data and analytics. It’s a time of exponential change, which challenges us to find new ways to blend strategy and design. One way innovation strategy attempts to predict disruption is by modeling how product categories change through waves of evolution. But that thinking is really challenged by how rapidly digital experiences are changing. We can look instead at how people are actually adapting to innovations within their own lives. The rapid speed of change means that we all have to be innovation and design strategists in our own lives now – constantly evolving new ways to make things work and make things meaningful – and that we must anticipate and manage disruptions. I think that’s one way of addressing the challenge of rapid experience evolution and continuous innovation.

Provocation 02 M I C H AEL WINNICK C E O AT DSCOUT

What are the benefits of slow ethnography vs. fast ethnography when the goal is to achieve human centricity?

I studied at the Institute of Design and then went to work at gravitytank when the team was still very small. It was very well timed, because it happened at the dawn of the larger interest in design thinking in the early 2000s. All the work we did was always grounded in primary research. That was one of the core principles of the company.

SPEED As such, I am a believer in ethnography and fieldwork. I saw an opportunity to take some principles of fieldwork and apply the prevalence of mobile technology and tools to scale context-driven research. Tools like dscout are partners to fieldwork, but, fundamentally, we want to take the strength and capabilities that come along with fieldwork and apply them to a broad array of research questions beyond the scope of traditional ethnography. Researchers are struggling with an issue around speed. To a researcher, what speed generally means is sacrificing rigor, specifically rigor in analysis and synthesis. It’s challenging, because if you do everything really quickly, you start losing out on the strength of the ethnographer or social scientist’s toolkit as well as the ability of a really smart design researcher to understand the problem. Researchers need to be able to work both “fast” and “slow.” Speed can come from efficiencies in the process; recruiting is an obvious area where we can gain time. We can also leverage new tools for analysis, helping to efficiently work through and organize field data. Speed is necessary, but it is critical that we still ask big questions and create the space to wrestle with them deeply. Great things happen when curiosity meets rigor.

MULTIPLE I think having an interdisciplinary team is key. I’ve worked in environments that foster a culture where smart people work well together in a style that’s not based on debate but on collaboration, and it leads to better outputs. I also think intuition plays a huge role in good research – we’re training our intuition to be able to recognize patterns. It’s hard to go into a research setting with very broad questions, especially when you’re trying to do [the work] quickly. You have to be able to develop an angle or take a thread that you think is going to be particularly useful for the problem at hand. You need to ask yourself: What can humans answer? If we had more time, how would we approach this differently? What shortcuts are we taking, and what are the consequences?

FUTURE In the future, researchers will be asked to wear different hats and play different roles as organizations scale. Today, good researchers are content strategists. They’re very aware of the fact that people feel as though they need a regular feed and drip of information that they’re sharing out to their team and audience on a regular basis. As we move forward, researchers will be asked to be more ambidextrous in terms of their ability to assimilate different styles of data into their findings. A major challenge for the field is around the question of: “How do I (the reseach practitioner) put tools and capabilities in the hands of other team members so they can conduct fieldwork and share findings in a way that still aligns with the dictates of good research?”

DR. SIMON ROBERTS CO-FOUNDER & PARTNER AT STRIPE PARTNERS

I’m a trained anthropologist. I did my fieldwork in the ‘90s in North India looking at the impacts of satellite TV. Immediately after that, I started working in commercial roles. I suppose I had a hunch that I could use anthropology in business in some way, shape, or form.

PERSPECTIVES It’s a question of timeframes. One of the principal challenges right now is framing research in the right way. Designing research and finding the right way to talk about it so that’s consistent with the cadence of an organization is also challenging. There is nothing wrong with doing work more quickly. But, there’s a challenge in thinking about how to do work well if you’re doing it quickly. With fast ethnography, there is that sense that it’s going to be surface-level. The framing of fast v.s slow is problematic, and I’d want to resist it. What we’re doing in the studio model is slightly different. We slow down for a week as a team, get present with each other and the world, and focus on the challenge. If you focus on one-month iteration research projects, you’re going to miss some of those bigger, more strategic questions – the things anthropologists are good at unpacking and making sense of. There’s a more profound challenge, which is a desire for companies to push research agendas into ever quicker iteration. What that actually leads to is a dangerous blind spot. Companies also need to slow down and look around, and they need to use research to fuel longer-term agendas and strategies. Sometimes that needs to be longer duration; you need to spend more time thinking and digesting. For me, fast vs. slow is the critical debate happening right now. PERSPECTIVES To me, good research and decision making is similar to being able to cook without a recipe. You understand intuitively when you should get more salt, when it’s cooked just right, when you have to turn the heat down, when to adjust the tartness of your tomatoes with a bit more sugar. When people can cook without a recipe, they’re able to do really amazing things. So for me, what’s really important is that research allows people of various backgrounds to cook without the recipe. The world is not static. Often when a question gets asked, it’s based on present conditions. A year later, the world can look very different. And so, if your team has intuitive and instinctive knowledge, they’re able to reframe questions according to the conditions of the day. Not to get too philosophical, but it’s not propositional knowledge [“knowing that”] but “know how” that teams need. Good research needs to allow people to act given their know how. PERSPECTIVES There’s more work to be done to ensure that it’s not just ethnographers who experience research and help clients engage with our work for themselves. Technology and smartphones will continue to have a role in how we work and explain the sorts of interactions we have with other people. But the way we make a case for what we do has to change, because the world around us is changing, and companies will always want us to do work cheaper and quicker.

Provocation 03 D R . JEANETTE BLOMBERG PRINCIPAL RESEARCH SCIENTIST A T I BM RESEARCH

What role does technology play in human centricity?

When I was finishing my PhD in anthropology at the University of California, Davis in the 1980s, I was casting my net rather broadly, not sure an academic job was in my future, and I became aware of what was going on at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). There, our interest was in how new technologies were going to transform workplaces. Back then, we were experimenting with how to integrate insights from anthropological studies into other sides of innovation.

HUMAN / TECH My view is that, at this point in time, we have to understand the motive but also the social context in which AI technologies and capabilities are being developed. We need to look behind the curtains to see how this AI technology came to be. What are the important things to track? What kind of knowledge do we want to surface? In what context do we want to surface it? A lot of unfortunate assumptions about the output from AI technology hinge on the notion that AI technologies don’t reflect the human context in which they were developed or the humans who developed them. In the era of AI that we’re currently in, we’re trying to get people to learn from engaging with AI. This is for everyday people, not just senior managers. How can we empower them to steer the evolution of the technology over time and participate in shaping it?

MULTIPLE One of the things we’ve learned over the years is that you need to try to understand what the world looks like from the point of view of your collaborators. You’re not going to have the expertise they have. You need to understand what their accountabilities are and what brings them success. When you don’t do that, you end up misunderstanding their actions, because their reasons aren’t your reasons. You need to recognize, for example, that the computer scientists you’re collaborating with have their own idea about what success looks like. Success for them may not be on the direct path of success for you or other folks who are part of the overall effort – but it’s still legitimate. Wherever possible, it’s also so important to involve those who are going to be engaged in using the technologies that you’re designing in the design process. FUTURE I’m interested in seeing how these new AI cognitive technologies are similar to or different from the ones we’ve always had. There is an ongoing negotiation that we have with technology. We are creators of technology, [but we are also impacted by] the technologies we develop. There’s always unresolved tension in the relationships we establish with technology. There’s the dystopian and utopian views about the possibilities of technology – but I think it’s a combination of both. As individuals and members of communities, we have a continual responsibility to think about and engage with technology in ways that will move it in a positive direction. I’m worried about some of the AI technologies that are potentially even more powerful at manipulation, but we’ve had those technologies forever. Advertising, rhetorical strategies, and other technologies have been around for a long time, and they have always worked to persuade and manipulate people. Now, we have new ways to do it, and they can look scary. But I think we’ve always had to develop the capabilities to resist, to recognize when manipulation is happening, and to build counter-narratives. I hope and trust that we’ll continue to do that as new technologies, like chatbots, recommendation engines, and fake news, increasingly come to be a part of our lives.

BILL SELMAN SENIOR STAFF USER RESEARCHER AT MOZILLA

When I first started learning as much as I could about UX, I realized that the role of design thinking has had such a remarkable influence in altering the culture of how engineering operates. It heavily impacts the product and software development process in general.

PERSPECTIVES At Mozilla, we have have a lot of opportunities to do things that other people wouldn’t be able to do from a profit-driven perspective. At the core of Mozilla’s mission is a moral stance about having a free and open internet. One of our objectives focuses on the question of: “How do we keep the internet open and free for people who are dealing with less robust internet infrastructures and coming online now?” In that way, it’s definitely human centric. Regarding AI, there’s an assumption in the phrase “artificial intelligence” that implies that it is independent of human intelligence and that it’s self-organizing. There are certainly instances of self-organizing intelligence, but, ultimately, we’re designing the fundamental building blocks of the systems – and they all come with the thinking and assumptions of human beings that we bring to them. If we want these AIs to be successful, we have to bring in the things we don’t necessarily think about as problems in computer science, like context and culture. We have to think about these sorts of things as we’re creating the building blocks for these tools, and those are the really hard problems to solve for. PERSPECTIVES Having people who aren’t researchers observe and participate in interviews and fieldwork is so important. It helps shape the overall understanding, and it helps us think strategically and have a shared set of knowledge. Having grown up in engineering, I realized there’s an assumption that everyone involved in a project must follow the development schedule of the engineering team. But one of the problems with this kind of project management is that it closes us off from understanding the true value of having a dynamic, multifaceted team. Yes, people are working together with engineering, but the tools of software development are more flexible now. Why do we have to tie everything exclusively to engineering schedules?

PERSPECTIVES There was the AI winter in the ‘80s and ‘90s when everyone ran up against technological constraints. However, I think what you’re seeing now are the human constraints that are holding AI back from being more successful. Understanding how to integrate messy human problems into decisions or analyses that are made by AI tools is going to be a large stumbling block as we move forward. On a ground level, you see errors that occur in algorithmically generated things like newsfeeds. Before, we didn’t have the technological abilities, but now, we’re able to do the computation. But we’re still missing a fundamental understanding of human context. That’s an extremely challenging, messy, contextual problem to address. I think the way that we think about solving those kinds of problems in computing is not really there yet – and that’s what we bring to the table as user researchers.

MARTHA COTTON DESIGN RESEARCH DIRECTOR AT FJORD

DR. SIMON PULMAN-JONES GLOBAL DIRECTOR, INNOVATION STRATEGY AT GFK

Martha has 20 years of consulting experience working as an applied ethnographer across multiple industries. Prior to joining Fjord, she was a partner at gravitytank, where she also led the Design Research practice. She also served as gravitytank’s CMO for two years. Martha is on the faculty of Northwestern University’s MMM program, where she developed and now teaches the Design Research curriculum. She holds a BA in English from Indiana University and an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.

Simon is a business anthropologist and leads GfK, a global strategic innovation market and consumer insights agency. His roots in human-centered innovation and design were forged with pioneering Chicago-based E-Lab / Sapient in the cauldron of the first internet bubble. He works with Cambridge University’s i-Teams program to spin out startups based on fundamental science and technology innovation. Simon holds a PhD in social anthropology from the London School of Economics.

SO, WHAT IS THE PURPOSE OF HAVING AND CONSIDERING MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES, AND HOW DOES IT DRIVE US FORWARD AS WE WORK TOWARD HUMAN CENTRICITY? HOW DOES IT HELP US BRING HUMAN MOTIVATIONS, EMOTIONS, NEEDS, AND DRIVERS – AS WELL AS EMPATHY FOR END USERS AND EACH OTHER – INTO EVERY PROJECT AND TEAM? We have presented you with three dual streams of perspectives around three departure questions to open up space for thinking about and investigating this idea further. We invite you to reach out with comments or thoughts on the topics discussed. All perspectives and opinions are welcome – the more the merrier.

MICHAEL WINNICK CEO AT DSCOUT

DR. SIMON ROBERTS CO-FOUNDER & PARTNER AT STRIPE PARTNERS

Michael founded dscout in 2012 with the mission of leveraging technology to make in-context research accessible for organizations. As dscout’s tools have become commonplace at progressive companies, their leaders regularly turn to Michael to help make sense of it all. Prior to leading dscout, Michael served as Managing Partner at gravitytank, an innovation consultancy now part of Salesforce. Michael is an alumnus of IIT Institute of Design (ID) and completed a BA at Stanford University.

Simon is a founder and partner of Stripe Partners. An experienced anthropologist, he is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field of business anthropology. Simon’s career highlights include running the UK’s first ethnographic research consultancy, Ideas Bazaar, and establishing a multidisciplinary innovation lab at Intel’s Digital Health group. He is a former co-chair of the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC), and his work has been covered by The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Quartz, Bloomberg and BBC. He holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Edinburgh.

Reach out to us @misc_mag and use #purposeperspectives to join the conversation on Twitter and Instagram. SPECIAL

THANKS

TO:

All interviewees who took the time to share their unique perspectives

Mira Blumenthal, lead editor of MISC for her support and enthusiasm

Jennifer Collier Jennings at EPIC for helping to facilitate these conversations

Lena Blackstock is a senior design strategist and design ethnographer at Idea Couture. Jac Sanscartier is an innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

D R . JE A N E T T E B L O M B E R G PR I N C I P A L R E S E A R C H S C I E N T I S T A T I B M R E S E A RCH

BILL SELMAN SENIOR STAFF USER RESEARCHER AT MOZILLA

Jeanette Blomberg is Principal Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California and adjunct professor at Roskilde University in Denmark. Currently, her research is focused on organizational analytics. She considers the linkages between human action, digital data production, data analytics, and business or societal outcomes. Jeanette received her PhD in anthropology from the University of California, Davis.

Bill Selman is a Senior Staff User Researcher at Mozilla who co-leads Mozilla’s user research team. Prior to Mozilla, Bill worked as a user researcher and designer on a variety of technology projects for companies ranging in size from small startups to multinational corporations. Before focusing on user research, Bill worked primarily as a software developer in open-source technology and languages. Bill has a BA in philosophy from Bard College and an MS in computer science from the University of Chicago.

THE CHALLE NGE OF APPLYING SCIE NCE

The concept of purpose is abstract, and it could very well be perceived as being at odds with science and its relentless pursuit of causal relationships. Indeed, in biology and genetics (my original field of study), purpose usually refers to some feature that has evolved under evolutionary pressure. The purpose of opposable thumbs is to grip objects and increase dexterity for complex tasks; the purpose of a tree’s long roots is to access water from moist

soil deep underground. It is not surprising, then, that googling “the biology of purpose” yields sparse results. One of the top hits I found during my search was a piece from 1938 titled “The Concept of Purpose in Biology,” published in The Quarterly Review of Biology. While the article is old, I actually found its argument to be surprisingly relevant and thought-provoking. The author, W.E. Agar, makes the case that, while a biologist may seek to understand macroscopic behavior by magnifying a sample closer and closer,

PHOTO: JASON LEUNG

BY TOM MASTERSON

TO PURPOS E

there are limits to the knowledge that they can gain. Agar goes so far as to say that “no amount of knowledge of the chemistry and physics” of an amoeba’s behavior would allow one to understand that behavior as one does the behavior of a fellow human, or even that of a dog. While the rapidly evolving science in fields like genomics and metabolomics is chipping away at Agar’s argument, his thesis holds true – particularly in the context of purpose. While we can be sure that electrons are buzzing around atoms in purposeful

creatures, we have yet to find how they link to and explain the distinct behaviors and actions that we consider to be purposeful. After all, we are still working to identify the microorganisms and genes that cause many diseases; we have not yet begun to explore those that dictate our career and life aspirations. As I continued to ponder Agar’s arguments – which, despite being nearly 80 years old, I still find interesting – I found myself reframing the world through multiple scientific fields.

Physical Science

Social Science

Physical science – which, for the purpose of this article, can be limited to chemistry, physics, and other similar disciplines – governs the natural “not alive” world. The forces in this world are characterized by their lack of agency in their actions – they are seemingly random in origin. The randomness of the environments breeds uncertainty and forces reactions to unforeseen circumstances. The ever-increasing entropy of the universe sets the stage for life: a puzzle on the grandest scale.

Life’s necessities, paired with the randomness of the physical world, unite to form the context for the outermost layer of the sciences: social science. As higher-order thinking emerges, so does purpose: a set of objectives born not just from the utilitarian restrictions of the physical and the adjustments of the biological, but also from a desire for something more. At the social level, sensory systems interact with the environment in a deliberate way – and they may sometimes even work to the organism’s disadvantage. Lions have complex social structures of dominance, and many primates learn to use tools or even language. Humans are the prime example of both the good and bad side of this; we accomplish unimaginable feats while simultaneously wreaking irreparable damage to our home and species daily.

Life Sciences Biology, physiology, and the rest of the life sciences all study, at their core, how organisms react to circumstances and meet their objectives in this uncertain world. In some instances, the reaction is immediate – a predator emerges from behind a tree and adrenaline takes over, initiating the classic fight or flight reaction that supports the goal of survival. Other times, the species reacts over many generations, evolving to mitigate or exploit a particular environmental factor. For example, birds gain colorful plumes of feathers and perform elaborate dances as they pursue procreation. The objectives thrust upon organisms by the physical world, including survival and procreation, are not what I would consider purpose, however; they are necessities born from each organism’s unique niche – a path used to navigate the hostile world.

Putting It Together In spite of all the progress we’ve made in science, I find myself thinking Agar was right. I’m stumped when I try to conceptualize a way in which physical or social sciences could ever fully explain one another. Trying to solve this complex riddle also challenges me to reassess the ways in which we consider health and business.

Consider the experience of the cancer patient. The medical sciences have come a long way in understanding the chemistry and biology of cancer, but the thing that continues to stymie researchers, drug developers, physicians, and patients is the sheer randomness of each tumor’s behavior. Though we know several of the mutations involved with the growth of tumors, sudden shifts in aggressiveness and random metastases to unexpected regions of the body are common. While chemists and geneticists work furiously to understand individual mutations and how they occur and manifest, anthropologists, psychiatrists, and many other social scientists work to understand the patients. Why do they so often believe that more painful treatments must be more effective, as if the cancer cares about how tough they are? Why do some patients refuse treatment, even when their physicians recommend it for their survival? Why does thinking “mind over matter” actually help some patients conquer terminal illnesses? These questions and more leave me to wonder: How could an in-depth understanding of chemistry, or anthropology, or any other discipline possibly answer these questions when years of history and experience govern our actions as much – or more – than the mysterious neurons and impulses from which they originate? While we know physical science forms the scaffolding for our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, can we ever aspire to understand hope, love, or sadness at a chemical level? In a business context, this gap in understanding is akin to the gap between metrics and vision. For example, if an organization knows that its website’s page views are up 35%, does this mean it achieving its vision of being the world’s leading technology company? Even if the number of page views was the metric on which the business was measuring success, reifying the data into an accomplishment in this way would be a fatal error. Or, to use a more serious example, if a drug company makes an earnest promise to put patients first, will treatment outcomes – or even revenues – improve? The obvious answer is that there is no way to tell without first understanding the context in between metrics and vision, namely the tactics and strategy that create this connection. Businesses make empty promises all the time, often with little more intent than to pacify an audience or to help their leaders sleep a bit easier at night thinking they’ve done the right thing. But consumers are more savvy than we give them credit for – they will determine whether the business is delivering on any of its promises, or whether those promises were even relevant in the first place. No business can hope to survive by relying on a visionary or by simply reverting to the buzzwordy claim of being “data driven.” Instead, the breadth of understanding required to tackle the world’s biggest problems requires a multidisciplinary approach. Food companies must deliver experiences that range from promoting health to discouraging excess, and they must understand the emotions and underlying science behind these concepts to deliver such experiences. Financial services organizations must consider the uncertainties of the world and predict how these possibilities could cripple their business and the businesses of their clients. And as healthcare companies are increasingly charged with delivering outcomes instead of merely pills and devices, they must look beyond clinical trial data in order to consider the daily lives of physicians and patients, whose purposes in life cannot be simply boiled down to conquering or treating a disease. To create connections between their aspirations and their results, and to transform social goals into a physical reality, businesses must unite disciplines and skills to create a multidisciplinary approach that acts as the cornerstone of their strategy. //// Tom Masterson is a senior healthcare innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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THE PURPOSE 46

B Y R O B E R T H. B R O W N

OF WORK

Everyone, whether they’re 21, 41, or 81, shares many similar motivations for working. We work to put food on the table; to buy nice things that improve our circumstances and lifestyles; to wield power and gain status; to enjoy physical or mental pursuits; and, of course, to maintain our own identities.

DIGITAL AGE

PHOTO: JOHN SALVINO

IN THE

This last point is critical. Whether you are a corporate leader, a skilled tradesperson, or a side-gigger – and whether you are financially comfortable or just getting by paycheck to paycheck – it can be all too easy to lose sight of who you are. At the same time, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a world without fulfilling work. How boring would that be? As the saying goes, “If you do something you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” Yet far too often, the reality is that work can be depressing. Millions of people have jobs that lead directly or indirectly to poor mental and physical health. Most of us have experienced the Sunday night blues, and some have even endured work-related diseases like coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (black lung) or sustained a serious workplace injury. So why is it that with the arrival of new digital tools like AI and automation – which could help free workers from the monotony of rote tasks and from the risk of dangerous work – there is a pervasive sense of doom surrounding the idea of the future of work? Isn’t it logical to want to diminish the repetitive tasks that lead to boredom, dread, drudgery, or injury? The fact is, advances in digital, robotics, and AI can help us obliterate obstacles to fulfilling our purpose. The future of work, it seems, is not work. The future of work is purpose.

What Comes Next? AI – long the domain of academic theory and Hollywood plotlines – is becoming “real” at an astonishing pace. It’s now being used to read X-rays and MRIs. It’s at the heart of stock trading. Chat with Siri or Alexa, and you’re using AI. Soon, AI will be found in every job, profession, and industry around the world. This has led many people to wonder what comes next. How will people make a living when machines are cheaper, faster, and smarter than they are? To many, the future of work can seem bleak, characterized by temporary jobs, minimum wage labor, and a ruling technocracy safely hidden away in gated communities. At Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work, we have a much more optimistic view – one based on a different interpretation of how change occurs and humans evolve. We created our own vision of the future of work, emerging from the following principles: / Work has always changed. Today, few people (if any) make a living as knocker-uppers, telegraphists, switchboard operators, lamplighters, or elevator operators. Yet these were all jobs that employed thousands of people in the past. / Lots of current work is awful. Millions of people around the world do work that is dull, dirty, or dangerous. Rather than trying to keep people in these jobs, we should liberate them to do more fulfilling, enjoyable, and lucrative work. / Machines need people. Machines can do more, but there is always more to do. Can a machine create, market, sell, or deliver itself? Machines are tools, and tools need to be used by people. / Human imagination or ingenuity shouldn’t be limited. Our greatest quality is our curiosity. In an age of intelligent machines, humans will continue to want to explore – and make – what’s next. This motivation will continue to act as a source of new work. / Technology will upgrade all aspects of society. Modern societies are still far from perfect. Are our healthcare systems, banks, or education systems as good as they’re ever going to be? Technology can seriously improve key services and experiences, and in doing so, can help free up our time. / Technology solves – and creates – problems. Intelligent machines will address many problems in society, but in doing so, they will also create new problems that humans will need to work on addressing – in other words, they will create new jobs. The signposts are already popping up everywhere: One of the most in-demand jobs in the modern marketing function is now the “Twitter data wrangler,” which would have sounded ludicrous just 10 years ago. Same goes for the iOS developer a mere 15 years ago. Beyond these roles, the jobs of the future will cultivate work with a sense of real human purpose. These roles will require workers to use their emotion, empathy, human judgment, and ethics, as well as to answer the question, “What’s the right thing to do?” AI can help with such tasks, but it can’t do them. It may sound counterintuitive, but in a world of more pervasive technology, activities that humans do well will become even more important. In the future, work will change, but it won’t go away – and it will certainly be infused with more purpose. So, the next big question is this: What new jobs will be created by new technologies?

What the Next 10 Years Will Bring: New Jobs By looking at current trends and future projections, we envisioned hundreds of jobs that could emerge from today’s major macro-economic, political, demographic, societal, cultural, business, and technology trends. We considered everything from carbon farmers and drone jockeys to 3D-printing engineers and avatar designers. These are jobs our teenage children may consider doing in the not-too-distant future. Of these, we zeroed in on 21 jobs that we are confident will be created over the next 10 to 15 years. These roles will create mass employment for people currently working in offices, stores, and on factory floors, whose current jobs may be displaced or disrupted by technology. Importantly, these aren’t jobs that would only employ a handful of bearded hipsters in the current “hot job markets” of Silicon Valley or New York – they are employment opportunities that many people will be able pursue. While the jobs we selected cover many disciplines, markets, and technologies, they also share three common themes (each one a strong contributor to the notion of purpose, fulfillment, and helping): / Coaching: Helping people get better at things (e.g. organizing their finances or managing their weight). / Caring: Improving people’s health and wellness. / Connecting: Bringing together separate disciplines or entities (e.g. people and machines, “traditional” and “shadow” IT, the physical and the virtual, or commerce and ethics). These themes speak to a universal truth: that no matter how technological our world becomes, ultimately, we want to experience the human touch. We want technology, as a tool, to help us – but we don’t want technology for technology’s sake. These jobs reflect this fact and point not to a cyberdystopia – a grim, dark singularity – but to a recognizable world in which technology has improved things for humans rather than robbing us of what we value most: our very humanity.

A Short Sample of the Jobs of the Future Here’s a quick look at just four of the jobs we envision emerging across industries and disciplines. We believe these positions will be in high demand in less than 10 years’ time: / AI-Assisted Healthcare Technician. Healthcare, supercharged by AI technology, will become available at scale and on-demand to all. As a result, in-depth patient care and diagnosis will no longer fall within the domain of doctors with seven years of qualifications. Instead, AI-assisted healthcare technicians will examine and diagnose patients, then prescribe and administer appropriate treatment with the help of AI-driven diagnosis software, digital examination tools, and remotely accessible doctors. This role could be filled by an experienced nurse or anyone in healthcare who is comfortable with digital equipment and able to build close, trusting relationships with patients. / Digital Tailors. With a high percentage of online clothing orders returned due to imperfect sizing and fit, ecommerce fashion retailers will increasingly turn to digital tailors. We imagine people in this role using a “sensor cubicle” to accurately gather customers’ measurements, ensuring clothing items ordered online fit perfectly when delivered. Once collected, the data will be uploaded into a central cloud-based ordering system. The digital tailor will also offer advice and recommendations to the customer about styling, cloth choice, drape, etc., and offer value-added input into fashion trends, new design names, upcoming events, etc. / Human-Machine Teaming Manager. Human-machine collaboration will be the backbone of the new workforce. Organizations will seek individuals who can help combine the strengths of robots and AI software (e.g. accuracy, endurance, computation, speed, etc.) with those of humans (e.g. cognition, judgment, empathy, versatility, etc.) to achieve common business goals. The key task for this role will be developing an interaction system through which humans and machines can mutually communicate their capabilities, goals, and intentions. The person in this role will also need to devise a task-planning system for human-machine collaboration. The end goal will be to create augmented hybrid teams on which humans improve themselves and machines do things “with” humans – not just “for” humans – to deliver much greater business outcomes. Individuals with backgrounds in psychology, computer science, or neuroscience would be a good fit for this role. / Augmented Reality (AR) Journey Builders. To meet the massive demand for personalization of real-time experiences, businesses will need AR journey engineers to help design, write, create, calibrate, gamify, build, and – most importantly – personalize the next generation of AR stories and in-the-moment vignettes for customers’ AR trips. AR journey builders will collaborate with engineering leads and technical artists to create the essential elements customers need to move through an AR experience of place, space, and time. This includes the setting, mood, historical time, information, tone, characters, and suggested things or experiences to buy, as well as the application of clients’ favorite games, sports teams, music, and cinematic style. These vignettes will be uploaded into a Pandora-like AR platform, ready for use, redeployment, and recombination into countless situations and parameters. Gamers, artists, and even improv actors with a passion for technology could find a new future in this role.

There Will Be Work Work has been central to mankind for millennia. Our very surnames convey that fact; take, for example, Baker, Brewer, Glover, Woodman, Wright, Mason, Judge, Weaver, Hunter, Dyer, and Fisher. In the future, work will continue to be core to our identities, our nature, our dreams, and our realities. While it won’t necessarily be the work we know or do now, it will most certainly be driven by a sense of purpose. //// Robert H. Brown is AVP, Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and co-author of the center’s “21 Jobs of the Future” report.

// THESE THEMES SPEAK TO A UNIVERSAL TRUTH: THAT NO MATTER HOW TECHNOLOGICAL OUR WORLD BECOMES, ULTIMATELY, WE WANT TO EXPERIENCE THE HUMAN TOUCH. WE WANT TECHNOLOGY, AS A TOOL, TO HELP US – BUT WE DON’T WANT TECHNOLOGY FOR TECHNOLOGY’S SAKE. //

WHEN EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

Business is about making profit and creating shareholder value. Though there is nothing wrong with this statement, it does not cause conflict when companies put some profit toward charitable causes and social impact. But today, capitalism is having a mid-life crisis. Where do we go from here? Forbes proclaims its belief in “the unmatched power of capitalism to improve human life.” I am a big believer that capitalism provides motivation for making improvements and economic advancements; however, we are currently seeing an extreme state of this combined with a winner-takesall mentality. Business should never be just about business; business is about people. People do not exist to serve businesses, but rather businesses serve people by creating jobs and economic exchange. There should be no lines between people (society) and business. One way of better connecting the two is through a social mission: a powerful way of creating purpose within an organization. To be successful, purpose should be deeply embedded in a company’s business strategy.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

WHY YOUR COMPANY NEEDS A PURPOSE

Look to the Young

What Do You Stand For?

One group advocating for a stronger sense of purpose in business are millennials. As they gain a louder voice in the future of work, their search for meaning in their own lives also reverberates. Given the amount of time people spend at work, it makes sense that the workplace is becoming one such source of meaning – a place for collective ambition. Large companies today, however, are struggling with attracting and keeping millennials because their expectations vary so much. According to Deloitte’s 2015 Millennial Survey, more than half of millennials aspire to become leaders within an organization, with the majority believing that businesses must be driven by more than profit alone . Research by the Center for American Progress indicates that 77% of millennials choose their place of work because their employers’ purpose aligns with their own. When given a choice though, millennials don’t gravitate toward corporations created by previous generations. It’s not that they don’t want to work for corporations at all; it’s just that they don’t want to work for the kind of places those corporations have become. This is an existential threat to some of the world’s greatest companies.

Almost every startup today has a deep sense of purpose – and that purpose extends to customers as well. They acknowledge that there is a growing trend for customer engagement that is far more purpose driven, with customers constantly asking, “What does your brand stand for?” In short, every company, brand, and startup needs a purpose. What are the main themes in an effective purpose-driven organization? These need to go beyond the obvious, such as eco-friendliness, conscious consumerism, socially responsible investing, and triplebottom-line businesses. What every business actually needs is to have purpose at its core. Purpose powers your strategy; purpose creates the human energy needed to achieve goals; purpose reflects the collective human ambition.

Now That There’s a Purpose, What Do You Do With It?

Moving Forward

The secret to sustaining corporate performance is having a powerful and well-socialized purpose. This purpose needs to be supported by a business model that informs capability development. Many consider these “softer” qualities of management as not being vital to organizational success. Think about an organization’s system and structures as the hardware of a business, while purpose and culture are the software that glue everything together. Leaders need to build a system that keeps the machine running, and purpose is the algorithm that forms the key differentiator that powers companies when they go through ups and downs in their lifecycles or are faced with disruptions. Consider the logic espoused by historians such as Alfred D. Chandler Jr., who wrote classics like Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, and you will find that companies exist to exploit the benefits of being big. They exist, in other words, to maximize efficiency at scale, but not to maximize the human imagination and creativity that is largely responsible for the success of today’s startups – the companies that will become enterprises tomorrow. Purpose needs to embody big ambitions. By having these lofty goals, companies can establish a connection between employees, customers, and organizational values. A collective, aspirational, and meaningful ambition that makes individuals part of something bigger than themselves and goes beyond making a salary can lead to shared meaning – and, as a result, effective commitment or emotional attachment. Purpose also builds culture, the vehicle into which purpose is embedded. This is the context for employee engagement and the footing needed to establish meaningfulness for both employees and managers.

What role does purpose play in your business? This should not be centered on how you make money. It is the collective ambition and associated values that align shareholders, employees, and managers. Your organization’s core purpose is its fundamental reason for being. An effective purpose reflects the importance people attach to the company’s work. It taps into their idealistic motivations and gets at the deeper reasons for the organization’s existence beyond making money. It does not mean profit becomes a second priority, but instead focuses on how profits are made.

How will purpose evolve? A company’s purpose can evolve over time, but it must not be used as a positioning tool. A growing company’s purpose could broaden, while a shrinking company requires a more focused purpose. Take Google, for example. Since their early days, Google’s purpose has been to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Surely, this has helped them evolve. Disney’s purpose, meanwhile, has always been to spread happiness, whatever the job function.

How is “purpose” different from “mission”? Traditionally, a mission statement is intended to clarify the “what” and “who” of a company, while a purpose statement also adds the “why” and “how.” As mentioned above, as a company grows, its objectives and goals will evolve. Its purpose needs to be revised as needed to better reflect the changing environment and competitive landscape. Meanwhile, the mission statement’s intent should be the first thing an employee considers when evaluating a strategic decision. This statement can range from a very simple to very complex set of ideas. Today, many mission statements are far too complicated and fail to resonate with employees. Whether you label it as mission or purpose, the goal is to connect people’s jobs to this statement – and it needs to be deeply anchored into corporate culture.

// People do not exist to serve businesses, but rather businesses serve people by creating jobs and economic exchange. //

When thinking about purpose-led organizational design, there are three common questions to ask:

Take Patagonia’s statement, for example: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” Patagonia’s mission statement combines both the values that bring them market success (creating high-quality products) and the values that contribute to a better world (environmental philanthropy). To do it differently, Patagonia’s purpose could be stated as, “To bring together people who love wild and beautiful places, and help them do their part in saving and protecting these places.” This purpose goes beyond the company’s policy to donate time, services, and at least 1% of its sales to hundreds of grassroots environmental groups around the world. It becomes part of the reason that people show up to work – and these are the people that a company wants to attract. The key is for the purpose to feel more emotive and personal.

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Check Your Purpose Before you go to your big executive offsite to discuss your next strategy, remember that having a purpose is what your organization needs most. Do you have a good one? Is it properly embedded into your company’s culture? Is it even defined? If you can’t answer these questions with confidence, stop and go back to the drawing board. You won’t get very far without it. //// Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

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Hands-on Projects

topped with spiced crickets, chickpeas, seaweed, and seeds.

PURPOSE

What does it mean to eat with purpose? BY JULIANA CICCARELLI A N D M AYA O C Z E R E T K O

What does food mean to you? How do you choose what goes into your grocery cart or where your next meal will come from? Are your decisions based on coupons? Convenience? Cravings? How good the food will look on Instagram? Or do you stop to think about how your choice will impact generations to come? There are 7.6 billion people on earth today – more than ever before. What we eat has a profound impact on our planet and the people who inhabit it, yet not everyone stops to think about the effects our food system has on the environment.

We asked ourselves: How can we encourage people to make purposeful food choices by changing the way they think about food and the impact it has on the future? The answer: an interactive and delicious educational dinner experience – dinner with a purpose. We teamed up with Soho House Toronto to design a curated culinary experience with the city’s top food influencers. The one-night culinary experience was intended to explore what eating with purpose means and to educate guests about the impact of their food choices on the future of food. In collaboration with Soho House’s chefs and mixologists, we developed a menu intended to take guests on a journey. The thematic courses of the menu highlighted the complexity of the world of food, the challenges consumers currently face, and the ways in which these issues can be overcome by making mindful food choices today to step into a sustainable future of food tomorrow.

Cashew ricotta with truffle vinaigrette and mushrooms on a sunflower cracker.

Course 2

WITH A

Living mixed green salad

Course 1

DINNER

Urbanized foodscapes featuring Living Earth Farm living greens

Alternative dairy featuring whipped cashew ricotta

With 54% of the world’s population living in urban areas – a number that’s expected to grow to 66% by 2050 – the use of technological farming advancements is vital for sustainability. One solution is the use of vertical farms, which can produce nutritious food at an accessible price point. Such methods would empower urban farmers while reducing the harmful impact that conventional farming systems have on the environment. As Ray Kurzweil has predicted, the next major food revolution will involve the use of AI algorithms in vertical agriculture to create ideal growing conditions in confined spaces. We opened the dinner with this technologydriven course to show guests that the future starts today. Vertical farms use hydroponic farming techniques where plants are grown in a watery solution of mineral nutrients instead of soil. These alternative systems recycle water and nutrients, reduce the amount of fossil fuels used in transportation, capture pollutants, and aren’t as highly dependent on pesticides or antibiotics-based fertilizers. By using vertical farms, we can reduce antibiotic uptake by half, reduce the amount of fresh water polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus by one third, and eliminate nearly all pesticide use. This is not to mention the reduction of emissions and costs of transportation that will occur when we use a decentralized production model, or the empowerment of urban farmers in cities around the world.

Biologically, food provides us with the nutrition we need to live our lives and build a future for generations to come. Culturally, it connects us with history and is integral to understanding our heritage. Many of the foods we eat have roots that extend beyond the nutrition they offer; rather, they represent a moment in time, a culture, or a memory. These cultures and our current food system are built on a few common staples that transform a common ingredient into a cultural tradition. Whether it be a locally grown herbal finish or the temperature at which a dish is served to complement the climate of origin, almost every culture’s food experience centers on global staples – whether dairy, meat, or grains. Fast-forward to modern cuisine: Today, processed foods have taken over our grocery shelves, and commercial farming methods have become the norm. Consequently, our bodies have also evolved, and with them our ability to digest the foods we consume. Though our biological needs are important, we must also recognize that we eat for a purpose that goes beyond just fueling our bodies. We eat for pleasure, communion, and identity. As we evolve biologically, we must seek alternatives to account for our increased number of sensitivities while also maintaining connections to our past. With this mentality in mind, new staples will continue to emerge, and common staples like milk and bread will take on new forms.

Impossible Burger served “Dirty Burger” style with cricket-flour onion rings and a boozy pistachio rose coconut milkshake.

Nitrogenfrozen cricket ice cream made with cricket tofu and topped with candy, silkworms, crickets, and grasshoppers.

Course 5

Course 4

Ramen from the sea served with seaweed, trout roe, and radish.

Course 3

Sustainable food featuring C-fu Foods cricket ice cream

Biodiverse sources featuring microalgae Algae is one of the most sustainable ingredients on the planet. With more health and functional benefits of algae being discovered, it’s no wonder that it is being touted as the next super-ingredient in the plant-based realm. While mass production has yet to hit mainstream markets, we think of it as one of the most nutritious foods known to humankind. Imagine if we had algae systems that could cover vast amounts of desert land, recycling wasteful pollution into highly nutritious foods and transforming it into fuel and biofertilizers. Microalgae may be the way of the future. Twenty times more productive than conventional crops, these tiny organisms are highly self sufficient. Sustainable for the body and the environment, algae is one of the most nutrient-dense foods. Algae could be the key ingredient for growing a future of abundance.

Alternative meat featuring Impossible Foods’ Impossible Burger Food connects us with our history and can awaken a sense of nostalgia with a smell, sight, or taste. But this same food also has the power to set up future generations for prosperity or disaster. Our main course represented the impact that sustainable food options could have on the environment when they are made available to communities at a similar cost and convenience. The Impossible Burger, by Impossible Foods, is a feat of food science. The plant-based burger replicates the taste and texture of ground beef to a remarkable level of accuracy. The patty – which includes heme, the same oxygencarrying molecule that turns blood red – is found in all living things, including plants. This is what gives the Impossible Burger its intense meaty flavor and aroma. The environmental impact of producing and eating meat – from the amount of water and energy required to the increase in antibioticresistant bacteria – is no new discovery. But Impossible Foods has the potential to disrupt the industry thanks to its ingenious packaging of a scientific breakthrough within the approachable form of a favorite North American comfort food. This marketing strategy, with its potential to reach a wide target population, gives Impossible Foods the opportunity to tackle a task that, until now, has seemed impossible for a plant-based protein: overcoming the environmental impact of large-scale agribusiness.

New proteins are emerging, and the little guys are joining the big fight. Approximately two billion people worldwide eat insects as part of a traditional diet, and these ingredients are finally being welcomed by formerly squeamish North American consumers. Many insects, including crickets, provide an incredibly sustainable protein source. More than 1,900 insect species are edible, including beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps, ants, grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets. We served our guests some of these little critters for dessert. The resources required to harvest insects are significantly lower than those needed for traditional protein sources. Insect farming is 12 times less resource intense than methods required for traditional livestock. It also uses less water: According to Venturopoly, if a family of 4 were to eat food made with insect protein one day a week for a year, they could save 650,000 liters of freshwater. Insect farming also requires less feed and less land, and it results in less greenhouse gas emissions – not to mention that food waste can be reused as feed, creating a circular and sustainable harvesting process. This mini livestock is as appetizing for our health as it is for the environment. Rich in protein, healthy fats, iron, and calcium, insects are just as nutritious – if not more so – than traditional sources of protein. And they make for an especially delicious ice cream!

Feeding the Future The global population will reach a projected 10 billion people by 2050. To sustain this growing population, we must reinvent our food systems in order to double our current crop production. The environmental challenges posed by our current agriculture needs are massive. The challenge of feeding an additional two billion mouths will be even greater. We have reached a critical point in time: People not only need revolution – they also want it. With a growing population actively willing to learn about the nutritional, global, and ethical implications surrounding the food they consume, now is the time for change. As a society, we must provide political and systemic support to the emerging startup food companies that are pushing the boundaries in food-tech breakthroughs. We must also demand more from existing Big Food organizations, as these large companies have the power and resources to take emerging food trends to mass markets. It will take the right combination of agility to navigate a constantly pivoting market; investments in R&D to continuously innovate existing markets; and the application of a human-centric lens to truly understand what consumers want – and what all global citizens need. //// Juliana Ciccarelli is a practice and technical project manager at Idea Couture. Maya Oczeretko is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

BY CHARLES ANDREW

Successful businesses are built on the efforts and choices of two types of volunteers, both of which play very different roles in the ecosystem that nourishes an organization. These two types are more commonly known as “employees” and “customers”; however, categorizing them this way does not capture the specific choices each type of volunteer makes to help the organization thrive. The term “customers” conveniently implies that the people who have purchased products or services from your business in the past will continue to do so in the future. In reality, these people were your customers, but over-confidence can easily creep in if you assign them a moniker that carelessly assumes their future behavior. Each new sale requires a new discretionary act; these people still have agency. This much is already generally appreciated, as evidenced by the application of

customer relationship management (CRM) methods and marketing campaigns. Purpose can also be leveraged to help increase the chances that someone who has been a customer will choose to be one again in the future. But what about the other type of volunteers, employees? Why should you call someone with a contract of employment (and a salary to go with it) a “volunteer”? The answer is simple: If you need your employees to put in more than the bare minimum – that is, if you need their commitment, engagement, and drive – then you need employees who volunteer to go the extra mile. Assuming that you can’t control all of your team members’ behaviors and attitudes – which you can’t, and probably don’t want to – how can you align their motivations and actions with those of your organization? The organization and its employees must share a common purpose. This will not only give employees a reason to do their best work, but will also work to guide employees’ plans, decisions, and actions. This is not an entirely new observation. In a 1994 Harvard Business Review article, Bartlett and Ghoshal wrote that “in most corporations today, people no longer know – or even care – what or why their companies are.” The key word here is “why.” Smart organizations know that if they can answer the question of why they exist in a way that provides meaning for employees and customers alike, they will have a large part of the recipe for success. The answer to the “why” question is what defines an organization’s purpose. To engage employees and customers alike, this will need to be something more inspiring than “to increase shareholder value.” As Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson states in “The Business Case for Purpose,” an analytic services report by the Harvard Business Review, “The sense of being part of something greater than yourself can lead to high levels of engagement, high levels of creativity, and the willingness to partner across functional and product boundaries within a company, which are hugely powerful.” Henderson explains, “Once they’re past a certain financial threshold, many people are as motivated by intrinsic

meaning and the sense that they are contributing to something worthwhile as much as they are by financial returns or status.” One example of an organization with a strong sense of purpose, both internally and externally, is Procter & Gamble. Despite their expertise in marketing, the organization knows the value of having an organizational and brand purpose. While marketing tactics might convince some consumers of a product’s superiority, relying on such tactics can breed cynicism internally and will ultimately disappoint consumers over the long

PHOTO: RAWPIXEL.COM

Purpose Is the Driving Force Successful Brands Need

Something to Believe In

term. As Procter & Gamble’s former Brand Director for Northern Europe, Roisin Donnelly, explained, “Purpose isn’t about having one tactical plan with a charity or an agency – it has to be big, inspiring, simple, and memorable. It has to inspire every single person in your company, as well as shareholders, stakeholders, and agencies.” P&G demonstrates this mentality at the brand level. For example, its feminine hygiene brand Always has set out to empower women and girls. The brand’s #LikeAGirl campaign, which aims to increase the trust that women and girls have in themselves, is more than just effective marketing; it has also made the idea of working for the brand more appealing for talented and ambitious people. As Donnelly added: “Nowadays, people aren’t loyal to companies. Post-millennials aren’t waking up every morning thinking they want to work for the same company for the next 42 years – they want a lot of different things in life. So they want to work for a company they can relate to.” When it comes to organizations having purpose, the numbers work out too. For their 2015 “The Business Case for Purpose” study, Harvard Business Review grouped companies according to the degree to which each one articulated and understood their own core purpose. The top group, which comprised 39% of the companies that responded to the survey, had outperformed the rest in terms of revenue growth, as well as in geographical expansion, innovation, and transformation. Leaders cannot exercise control over everything relevant to a business’s success, including employees’ voluntary commitment, customers’ voluntary choices, and the many ideas and decisions that contribute to the organization’s success. A central purpose can be the difference between everyone rowing in the same direction and simply moving in circles. //// Charles Andrew is a senior client partner at Idea Couture.

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PURPOSE

In business, “purpose” is the new black. It has become very fashionable for consultants and business professors to encourage companies to ask “why” they are in business. What is their raison d’être, beyond just making money? Or is that all there is? After almost 40 years of neoliberal economics, the prevailing and very entrenched answer to this question is that a corporation’s sole purpose is to maximize shareholder value. And the primary metric of that value is stock price. This has become orthodoxy in both business and the academy to the point where, as pointed out by Miguel Padró in a 2014 publication for the Aspen Institute, MBAs leave school “believing that they are legally and morally obligated to maximize stock price for their investors.” In other words, it has become religion. There is no law that obligates corporations to maximize shareholder value. As the above-mentioned study asserts, even Delaware corporate law – the most shareholder-friendly in the United States – remains “fundamentally ambivalent about defining the purpose of corporations.” It may not be a legal requirement to put shareholders first, but to oppose that notion has in the last few decades been considered blasphemous. Why did this particular definition of corporate purpose catch fire in the first place? From the time the corporation as we know it emerged in the mid-19th century until the Reagan administration, the debate about corporate purpose was vigorous and unresolved. But since it was “fundamentally ambivalent,” and since business abhors ambivalence, the simplicity and irreducibility of shareholder value was eagerly embraced. Here was one data point, one simple metric, the ultimate reduction of all the value chain’s inputs and outputs into a single, tidy little number. It was as if we had finally reached the apotheosis of modernist business thinking, the ultimate “less is more” moment. Henceforth, all of the messy contexts and complexities of corporate reality would answer to one call: the one the CEO made to analysts every quarter, in which the most important question was, “Will the stock price match, exceed, or miss our expectations?”

Corporate Taxes: Expectation vs. Reality To those against the primacy of shareholder value, this quarterly trial by fire automatically prioritizes short-term decision making and encourages all kinds of gaming designed to keep the stock price up, from spreading false rumors to executing share buybacks. It is also seen by non-believers to deprioritize the creation of long-term strategic value for both the enterprise and the communities in which it operates. If the corporation is primarily focused on keeping analysts and shareholders happy in the short term, all other constituents – from employees to customers to communities – lose in the long term. We can see this in the context of taxation. Neoliberal orthodoxy dictates that reducing corporate taxes is a necessity for remaining competitive in the global marketplace. In the US, everyone complains about the statutory corporate tax rate of 35%. But due to the complexity of the tax code and its many loopholes, incentives, and subsidies, corporations actually are more likely to pay an average of 13-19%. According to SEC data, 15 of the largest Fortune 100 companies, with combined revenues of over a trillion dollars, paid almost zero (0.059%) in federal income taxes in 2016. Between 2008 and 2015, US utility companies paid an effective rate of 3.1%, telecoms paid 11.5%, and internet services paid 15.6%. Sounds like 35% was just a suggestion. Tax incentives and subsidies are meant to encourage job creation and economy building. But that’s not what’s happened. Instead of investing in growth and innovation, corporations are hoarding their cash. US firms are sitting on cash reserves of $1.9T at home and $2.5T abroad. They are awash in capital. Without corporate paying its fair share of income taxes, communities suffer. Corporations not only get access to public infrastructure – they also escape the

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY WILL NOVOSEDLIK

OVERCOMING THE TYRANNY OF THE QUARTERLY REPORT

The Business Case for Purpose In a 2006 Harvard Business Review article entitled “Strategy & Society: The Link between Competitive Advantage and Corporate Social Responsibility” by Porter and Kramer, and again in the January 2011 follow-up piece by Porter entitled “Creating Shared Value: Redefining Capitalism and the Role of the Corporation in Society,” Porter came to the conclusion that shareholder primacy was unsustainable. But his motivation wasn’t entirely altruistic; it was based on the belief that by considering the corporation’s broader impact on society and the environment, companies could actually develop greater competitive advantage. Here was an argument for taking a balanced approach to sustainable prosperity that was framed within a set of business principles as opposed to moral ones. By leveraging “innovation in new technologies, operating methods, and management approaches,” Porter suggested, “a firm can improve society while increasing their productivity and profitability.” He provided three ways in which to achieve this balance: / Reconceive products and markets to provide appropriate services and cater to unmet needs. For example, the provision of low-cost cellphones developed new market opportunities as well as new services for the poor. / Redefine productivity in the value chain to mitigate risks and boost productivity. For example, by reducing excess packing in product distribution, a business could also reduce both cost and environmental degradation. / Enable local cluster development by improving the external framework that supports the company’s operations. For example, this could be achieved by developing the skills of suppliers.

services to the point where schools, hospitals, and social programs are in a state of steady deterioration, then you better have something else to offer. In a recent EY paper entitled “Winning with Purpose,” research revealed that 89% of customers believe that purpose-driven companies deliver higher quality products and services. In an Edelman study, 72% of respondents said that they would recommend a company with a purpose – a 39% increase from 2008. The Havas Meaningful Brands Index claims that between 1996 and 2011, purpose-led companies performed 10 times better than the S&P 500 in terms of revenue growth. In the same study 75% of people reported expecting brands to improve wellbeing and quality of life, but only 40% believe they are doing so. It’s no surprise that people wouldn’t care if 74% of the brands existing today were to disappear. If these stats are to be believed, purpose is looking more like a

This was an attempt to apply business logic to the challenge of shared prosperity. It was never, in Porter’s own words, about “being a good corporate citizen, but being a better capitalist – it’s a win-win.” Being a “better capitalist” sounds like it would be more motivating to a businessperson than being a “good corporate citizen.” But the idea that you can be profitable by being considerate of people and the environment has not exactly caught fire, due in part to the fact that rigorous analysis of the impact of shared value mechanisms has been lacking. Despite these shortcomings, there are some examples of Fortune 100 companies and leading consulting firms that have adopted these principles. Unilever CEO Paul Polman has become the poster boy for fusing social purpose with business success. Unilever can lay authentic claims on the link between business and society, as it was founded in the 1880s by creating the world’s first branded bar of soap (Sunlight) to combat disease and infant death in the abject poverty of Victorian England. More than 130 years later, Polman sees the world through a very similar lens, pointing out that over 160 million children in the world are stunted from malnutrition, 8 million people die prematurely each year from pollution, and the world’s richest 1 billion people consume 75% of its natural resources. In a February 2017 Fortune magazine article, Polman remarks, “We’re wasting 30-40% of the food in this world, whilst millions go to bed hungry. Why do we not have the moral courage to attack that?” Could it be that the allure of short-term gains makes it impossible for some investors to summon the patience required for a long-term strategy? In response to this attitude, Polman has famously abolished quarterly earnings guidance for investors and analysts. He sides with those who argue that “the tyranny of the quarterly report traps public companies into continually trying to drive up share prices for investors, while downgrading more long-term, complicated missions, like improving working conditions and the environment.” It is a bold move for the CEO of one of the world’s largest food producers to make. Time will tell if the market has the sense – or the patience – to embrace it.

Learning to Look Beyond Shareholder Primacy “Leadership is about who the leader is, not what the leader does… the most successful leaders are strong characters, and have a strong purpose – they do not just focus on shareholder value which is too narrow, and too short term.” These are the words of Dominic Barton, Global Managing Director of consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He notes that there will be 2.2 billion new middle-class consumers by 2030, most of them in Asia and Africa. At the same time, there will be increasing challenges to the availability of natural resources. “This is why climate change and sustainability are business issues,” he says. This focus on the middle class – shrinking in the west while growing in the east – is a reflection of the role it has historically played as the engine of shared economic prosperity. As Robert Reich has so often said, if you keep taking money out of the pockets of the middle class, there will be no one to buy your products and services. So it may come as no surprise that, after years of austerity and slow-to-no growth, people are looking for something more from corporations and business in general. If you are keeping wages stagnant for decades and not creating jobs, and if you enjoy corporate tax reductions paid for by cuts to public

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

responsibility of building, maintaining, and upgrading it. The communities that share that infrastructure, on the other hand, bear the burden. As Matthew Gardner, Senior Fellow at Washington’s Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said in a recent New York Times article, “When the biggest companies aren’t paying their fair share, that means the rest of us are left to pick up the slack. It means small business and middle-income families are paying more.” Unfortunately, the middle class is shrinking just as its tax burden, along with the cost of living, is climbing. According to a March 2016 paper by Stanford’s Sean F. Reardon and Cornell’s Kendra Bischoff, middle wage earners shrank from 65% to 41% of the population between 1970 and 2012. Over the same period, middleclass wages have stagnated. In 1973, the median hourly wage was $4.14. In 2014 dollars, that would be $22.07. Meanwhile, the median hourly wage in 2014 was $20.74. In 2014 terms, that’s actually over $2000 a year less than it was 44 years ago. Tax avoidance (or “tax efficiency,” as it’s euphemistically referred to) is only one of the tools employed by corporations to prioritize shareholders. Globalization, privatization, and financial deregulation have contributed significantly to the bottom line, even as they have hastened the deterioration of the middle class through job shrinkage and wage stagnation. The middle class, once the engine of consumption and the bulwark of North American prosperity, is in a state of growing precarity. And when that engine sputters, the market will not be far behind.

source of competitive advantage than ever. As an indicator of how much this concept has taken hold, the September/October 2017 issue of Harvard Business Review ran an article that, in HBR tradition, codifies the approach to competing on social purpose. The fact that the article was co-written by a Coca-Cola executive and a business professor for the benefit of large multinational corporations like IBM, Google, Fedex, and VISA is a signal that some of the giants are paying attention to the stats listed above. One would love to believe that this is the result of a shifting moral perspective. But in the perverse logic of neoliberal economics, the market’s only moral compass is shareholder primacy. For purpose to replace that would require a profound paradigmatic shift – or a socioeconomic catastrophe even broader and deeper than the Great Recession. Let’s hope for the former. //// Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture.

// THE MIDDLE CLASS, ONCE THE ENGINE OF CONSUMPTION AND THE BULWARK OF NORTH AMERICAN PROSPERITY, IS IN A STATE OF GROWING PRECARITY. AND WHEN THAT ENGINE SPUTTERS, THE MARKET WILL NOT BE FAR BEHIND. //

CAN DESIGN CREATE A MORE RESILIENT WORLD Change begins with a question.

The Future of Purpose BY: ROBERT BOLTON AND RON N I E P A N G DESIGN: JEMUEL DATILES

What will you ask? Students at Parsons School of Design know that the right question can change everything. That’s why you’ll work with peers and industry partners in NYC to improve society through rigorous inquiry and design innovation. At the only design school within a comprehensive university—The New School—you’ll collaborate across disciplines to create a more just, more beautiful, better-designed world. Come join a new generation of artists. GRADUATE FIELDS OF STUDY Architecture Communication Design Curatorial Studies Data Visualization Design and Technology Design Studies Fashion Design Fashion Studies Fine Arts Industrial Design Interior Design Lighting Design Strategic Design and Management Transdisciplinary Design Urban Ecologies and Urban Practice Discover more at newschool.edu/parsons Photo by Martin Seck / Equal Opportunity Institution

IF WE ASKED YOU WHAT THE NEXT GENERATION OF. WORLD-CLASS BUSINESSES WILL DO, YOU WOULD. LIKELY LIST SOME BUZZWORD TECHNOLOGIES.

You would probably say something about cryptocurrency, or AI, or virtual reality. But if we asked you why the next generation of businesses will exist, you might have a little more trouble. So, what purpose will the next generation of worldclass businesses serve? Why will they exist? “White space” can be defined as the place where unmet and unarticulated needs are uncovered to create opportunities for innovation. If an organization’s purpose is its reason to exist, then white-space mapping the future of purpose is a project of determining what kinds of companies could and should exist in near-, mid- and, long-term futures.

Here, we have attempted to do just that by thematically mapping the current state of purpose in business. We looked to uncover the expressed purposes of some of today’s organizations. Then we asked, where are the gaps? What are the intentions of tomorrow that will motivate and organize the flow of people and capital? What needs doing? Purpose marries our strengths with our passions; we have to consider how people’s values are evolving and what kinds of new competencies are emerging in order to determine what our purposes might be in the future. As in life, discovering new purpose in business involves venturing into the unknown. Like people, brands that lack genuine purpose are usually overly concerned with validation – rather than to working to shape the future, they seek approval. The following maps and writings are designed to help business leaders and entrepreneurs think differently about purpose. Let’s acknowledge first the pathetic reality that, when it comes to purpose, most of the world’s large organizations have cluttered themselves into a few conventional thematic territories. Now, let us think about the white space. It’s time to forget about the present, and think about your organization’s future purpose – the idea or intention that will captivate markets, drive meaningful growth, and inspire your people to change the world.

INNOVATIVE

ACCELERATE

PRODUCTS ACHIEVE DREAMS

FREEDOM

INNOVATION

EMPOWER

SELF-FULFILLMENT INSPIRE HAPPINESS IMPROVE

LIVES MOMENTS THAT MATTER

GLOBAL

RESPONSIBILITY

FIX THE WORLD

CARE FOR THE WORLD

CONNECTIVITY

WELL-BEING

PEACE OF MIND

FOUNDATIONAL NEEDS

SPREAD

ACCESS

SIMPLICITY SAFETY AND SECURITY

Sustainability and Stewardship

Untapped Innovation Missions

We identified three categories of organizations that are focused on global responsibility. There were those focused on fixing the world by tackling big challenges through research and innovation, such as MIT and Singularity University, or through investment and entrepreneurship, like Acumen. Others were focused on “improving lives.” Here, we located pharmaceutical companies, including Merck. There is clearly adjacent white space here, especially if we get a little more specific about what we mean by “improving lives.” How about a brand devoted to helping the world sleep better? Or a brand whose expressed purpose is “cultivating mental wellness”? Finally, a number of brands utilize the rhetoric “care for the world,” which seems like code for “doing a little bit less damage to the world.” Chevron claims to improve lives and power the world forward, while H&M states its intent to make a circular economy a reality for its business model. In reality, however, Chevron is an operator of oil sands that are notoriously detrimental for the environment, and H&M continues to propagate the sins of fast fashion. Herein lies the first spectrum of opportunity: to be a company that actually walks the walk.

Amidst the organizations we identified whose purposes were explicitly about innovating, a number of organizations distinguished their particular variety of innovation. There were those focused explicitly on making iterative advances, those focused on creating innovations to accelerate the velocity of progress in specific fields, and even companies whose innovations are intended to help people innovate (such as Adobe and Autodesk). None of the organizations we looked at focused explicitly on scientific discovery, disruptive innovation, or venturing into novel and non-competitive spaces.

What would it mean for a company to actually stand for global stewardship? A good example of a company practicing what they preach is Lockheed Martin. While most widely known as an aerospace and defense company, it is also heavily invested in environ-

mental sustainability. It was ahead of the curve when it came to regulation, setting “Go Green 2020 Goals” two years before the US federal government did. According to a post on the Harvard Business School website, Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson leads the company with the mindset that “the only future that exists is one with meaningful climate change.” With this at the forefront, Lockheed Martin is heavily committed to projects such as capturing the energy of oceanic tides and, most recently, producing a vehicle-sized nuclear fusion reactor. Some describe these moves as reckless, but for a company still largely synonymous with “defense contractor,” could they one day reposition themselves as a company whose purpose is focused on climate response and global safety? Tesla is another company that indeed walks the walk. Rather than spewing rhetoric about making the world a better place, their purpose is acutely specific: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” So far, it seems to be working. One can imagine a number of equally strong purposes in adjacent spaces.

Purpose—

TO RESOURCEFULLY MATCH U N D E R U T I L I Z E D . TECHNOLOGIES WITH UNMET NEEDS

The exercise of searching for white space within the current cacophony of expressed purposes prompted a simple idea that seems almost too obvious: be a white-space company. By this, we mean constantly taking inventory of what is possible, looking toward the past and the future, and finding new applications of existing technologies in underexplored and non-trending spaces.

Purpose—

TO MAKE THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY. VIABLE BY MANAGING THE FLOW OF. FINITE AND RENEWABLE RESOURCES

A Collaboration Company Ideas and Information In reviewing the current state of purpose, we found a few brands – like Facebook, TED, and Twitter – devoted to sharing and spreading ideas. These brands have played an important role in democratizing how information is accessed and disseminated, but they have all infamously contributed to misinformation and even been appropriated as weapons of information warfare. In a social moment characterized by phrases like “alternative facts,” “post-truth,” “fake news,” and “normalized fraud,” the white space reveals itself in the world’s cry for help parsing the troves of information, checking facts, and distinguishing what is true from what is false.

Take, for instance, Vox, which was launched, in its current form, by Ezra Klein in 2014. Vox is known for providing context to trending news stories. They exist to “explain the news… and everything else that matters.” In the social media space, Snap, Inc. (Snapchat) is employing an in-house team of journalists to evaluate the relevance and accuracy of user-submitted footage from big events before republishing them. Within the public domain, Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales’s WikiTribune aims to fix fake news with volunteer fact-checking.

Google’s purpose is “to organize the world’s information.” The New York Times aims “to enhance society by creating, collecting, and distributing high-quality news and information.” But where is the company who explicitly expresses its purpose as devotion to “validating information and providing context to content”? While there are no major companies making inroads to this territory, there are some newcomers heading that way, signaling that there is real value in addressing the information crisis.

TO VALIDATE THE WORLD’S I N F O R M A T I O N . AND PROVIDE CONTEXT T O C O N T E N T

Purpose—

In today’s world, there is a seemingly dichotomous emphasis on the individual – characterized by companies that capitalize on the need for self-fulfillment – as well as on the collective, which is highlighted by companies that are honing in on global responsibility. There is also no shortage of organizations that attempt to bridge this divide, focusing on the idea of bringing individuals together (i.e. connectivity). Facebook aims to “make the world more open and connected,” while Southwest Airlines hopes to “connect people to what’s important in their lives.” The feeling of connectedness is an inherent driver for many of us; but in our future, where more brains are nearly always better than one in the process of innovation, which companies will focus on collaboration? Collaboration is the process of working together to realize something successfully through the creation of new tools, software, or services. Major companies in this space that have permeated the way people share and collaborate include Google (most notably through Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides; more recently through Google Keep, a note-taking application that can be added to by collaborators) as well as Adobe (via its Creative Cloud). With the advent of collaborative tools popularized by applications such as Slack, and the possibilities created by emerging technologies, such as telerobotics and VR telepresence, as well as the intersections between these

developments, our question is: What will the collaborative tools of the future look like? Purpose—

TO BRING PEOPLE CLOSER AND HELP. TEAMS WORK TOGETHER ACROSS SPACE. .AND TIME

Owning “Cool” Can a company be deliberately cool? If being cool is being relaxed and apathetic, then perhaps “cool” can’t be part of a company’s purpose. But some fashion brands, like Levi’s, Adidas, and Converse, have stayed consistently cool for decades. They certainly do not articulate it as an explicit goal, but they do spend heavily to stay on trend, especially through cultural investments like event sponsorships and influencer endorsements. Brands as diverse as Supreme, GoPro, Doritos, and PlayStation have cracked the cool code, building equity through associations with contemporary youth culture, while Google and Facebook are considered cool places to work. Cool translates into cash. And since every company in the world wants to be desirable and attract the best talent, coolness is an unspoken priority; every company wants to be cool. The need is there, but no big business will ever fill this gap. So who will own cool? The people. Cool always starts with revolutionary people. And cool is anti-establishment. Imagine the world’s first massively multi-influencer online clubhouse; a sceneowned social network; an incorruptible underground subculture that sells out to brands and shares the profits; or a “Co-op of Cool” that disrupts the current state of exploitative agencies and social media platforms, capitalizing on the eternally in-style.

Purpose—

Pfizer’s Viagra brand is too narrowly focused to claim the realm of great sex; Playboy may be universally recognized, but only as an old and out-of-touch dinosaur brand. The pornography industry, while popular for private consumption, is notorious for tastelessness and is publicly taboo. The stated purposes of its biggest companies are as generic as their names. Larry Flynt’s “New Frontier Media,” for example, “produces and distributes transactional television.” Tinder is similarly bland – it apparently exists to “facilitate communication between mutually interested users.” Carex and Cupid, the world’s first and second largest condom manufacturers, are shifting their innovation mandates to focus more on pleasure and satisfaction. Each would be an interesting, if unlikely, candidate to become the company whose stated purpose is “helping people express themselves sexually – safely, freely, and pleasurably.” If not the established brands, there are a few purpose-driven startups staking claim to the vast territory that is sex. Cambyo

GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY

ACCELERATE

IMPROVE LIVES

TO KEEP COOL AND CARRY ON

Enhancing quality of life and contributing to a healthier future; to help shape a better and healthier world; and to inspire people to live healthier lives

To accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy Be the global leader in supporting our customers’ missions, strengthening security, and advancing scientific discovery

To discover, develop, and provide innovative products and services that save and improve lives around the world

INSPIRE

To be a company that inspires and fulfills your curiosity

FIX THE WORLD

To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time

To educate, inspire, and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges

Gives everyone – from emerging artists to global brands – everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences

To advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century

EMPOWER

Sex and Intimacy Despite all the brands out there that profess that their purpose is to improve lives, not one of them is talking about sex. How is it that, as of yet, no world-class company is devoted purely to sex and sexual health?

INNOVATION

is a research and content initiative devoted to helping “accelerate the liberation of sex” and “helping people improve their intimate lives.” It is doubtful that whoever said “sex sells” was thinking of anything as meaningful and mindful as Cambyo, but the old aphorism will prove itself again when Cambyo becomes the world’s trusted source of information about sex. Cindy Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn, whose goal is to “make #realworldsex socially acceptable,” is another exceptional example. There is plenty of room to play here. Who are the progressive, responsible, and imaginative new brands ready to make sex their raison d’être? Purpose—

TO PROMOTE SEXUAL HEALTH, AND PLEASURE

FREEDOM,

Builds software that helps people imagine, design, and create a better world

To help our customers achieve financial prosperity and peace of mind

To change the way the world tackles poverty by investing in companies, leaders, and ideas CARE FOR THE WORLD

Develop the energy that improves lives and powers the world forward INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS

Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world Make all athletes better through passion, design, and the relentless pursuit of innovation

To make sustainable fashion choices available, attractive, and affordable to as many people as possible

SELF-FULFILLMENT

FOUNDATIONAL NEEDS

FREEDOM

WELL-BEING

Fulfilling dreams of personal freedom is more than a phrase. It’s our purpose and our passion. We bring a commitment of exceptional customer experiences to everything we do – from the innovation of our products to the precision of our manufacturing – culminating with our strong supplier and dealer networks

We believe our role in the insurance industry is to shift perceptions and move beyond being simply a provider. To that end, we work to empower our members and help them live healthy, active, and rewarding lives Our Reason for Being is creating and commercializing products and services that promote wellness/ being well

ACHIEVE DREAMS

To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more

To be one of the world’s leading producers and providers of entertainment and information. Using our portfolio of brands to differentiate our content, services, and consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative, and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world

MOMENTS THAT MATTER

Real food that matters for life’s moments

SAFETY AND SECURITY

With our policyholders we are engaged in a great mutual enterprise. It is great because it seeks to prevent crippling injuries and death by removing the causes of home, highway, and work accidents. It is great because it deals in the relief of pain and sorrow and fear and loss. It is great because it works to preserve and protect the things people earn and build and own and cherish. Its true greatness will be measured by our power to help people live safer, more secure lives

To organize the world‘s information and make it universally accessible and useful

Xerox innovates the way the world communicates, connects, and works, helping companies deliver breakthrough experiences to improve and grow their business

Saving people money so they can live better

To connect people with their world everywhere they live, work, and play – and do it better than anyone else

Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together

SIMPLICITY

Every day, everywhere, we use our technology and expertise to make payments safe, simple, and smart

To connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel

Connect, protect, explore, and inspire the world through aerospace innovation

Every home is our domain, every customer and customer activity our opportunity. This vision fuels the passion that we have for our customers, pushing us to provide innovative solutions to uniquely meet their needs

HAPPINESS

ACCESS

Utilize the power of Moore’s Law to bring smart, connected devices to every person on earth

PEACE OF MIND

To help people manage the risks of everyday life, recover from the unexpected, and realize their dreams

To refresh the world, to inspire moments of optimism and happiness, and to create value and make a difference

CONNECTIVITY

SPREAD

To spread ideas

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WHEN YOUR PURPOSE IS ACTUALLY MEANINGLESS BY SHANE SAUNDERSON

Nothing you do is valuable. Prove me wrong on that, but for just a short while, I want you to entertain the idea that everything you work so hard at and believe so strongly in simply carries the illusion of value. I want you to challenge yourself to that end because, like all preposterous statements, my words carry with them a grain of truth. And it is only by acknowledging your wrongdoings, however insignificant, that you can permit yourself the freedom to do what is right – to find your value.

I used to tell myself that I wanted to change the world, that I could affect a billion lives. Now I’m beginning to realize that all I really need are a few grinning faces. I used to tell myself that I wanted to disrupt the status quo and rewrite the course of technological history. Now I’m starting to think that I just want to feel clever, unique, and special. I used to tell myself that I was going to invent the next best thing since sliced bread. Now it seems that I’d be happy with a couple of pieces of sliced bread. While I’ve crafted these adorable little comments for your every chuckle and chortle, at the core, my true issue isn’t the fact that I’ve lost sight of my values – it’s that I am fundamentally beginning to question the underlying principles upon which these values were founded. In the immortal words of Chuck Palahniuk, “We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t.

PHOTO: CLARK TIBBS

The Illusion of Value

And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.” Still, I’ve stopped blaming my upbringing for giving me false hopes, and instead have started blaming myself for believing them. Fool me once, shame on you, but fool me for over 30 years? Good god, what is my problem? My desire to change the world is the same one that has been shoved into the head of every overachieving kid with big potential. “With your skills,” we were all told, “if you work hard, you could change the world.” They forgot to add the part about needing to also have the luck of a survivor of multiple lightning strikes, a network greater than Kevin Bacon’s, and enough sleepless nights to make medical professionals diagnose a new type of insomnia. With my need to overachieve, I became the ultimate underdog, determined to disrupt. In my quest to change the world, I was met with hurdles so frequently that jumping simply became a natural way of living. To this day, I’m weary of any task that is too easy to accomplish. My upbringing didn’t create a winner, it created a fighter – a man who can become so caught up in the struggle that he misses sight of the true objective. My desire to create something new came from a childhood of idolizing inventors like Edison, Bell, Tesla, Brunel, Turing, and da Vinci. However, nearly all of these men lived during a time when it was possible for a single polymath to create something drastically new, thereby changing the course of history. To create something revolutionary in this day and age, it seems one needs a platoon of highly specialized individuals from a plethora of disciplines, each of which would take half a lifetime to master. These are my own strange, Lisa Simpson-esque intellectual obsessions and shortcomings. Some of them may sound familiar, but if they don’t, you likely have your own equally ridiculous, convoluted, and self-destructive motivations and beliefs pushing you forward – not necessarily toward greatness or success, just forward. If this sounds disheartening, it should. You should question everything you know about yourself and your definitions of value and success. You may be one of those lucky savants who simply falls into place with their life’s work and meaning, but it’s much more likely that you’re another confused, ambition-filled human gun: capable of powerful and incredible acts, but only as useful as the last agent to grab hold of you, take aim, and pull the trigger. Your purpose is likely not your own. It is something that has been beaten into you through some combination of influences that include your family, friends, and the media. If you’re fine with subconsciously fulfilling someone else’s goals and dreams, this may not be a problem for you; however, if you start to peel back the layers and question your own intent, you may not like what you find at the core. You may start to see the huge divide that exists between the dream you’ve been chasing and the things that truly make you happy. This isn’t a fun discovery to make, and dragging yourself through this self-reflective mud can be a difficult slog – but coming out on the other side can be more rewarding than anything you’ve spent decades chasing. We hear feel-good stories along this line: former Wall Street trader turned brewer, former legal council starts adventure tour guide business, former accountant begins building affordable homes. Granted, these people are fortunate enough to have built up the funds to make these kinds of shifts, yet all too often, we sit back and watch them, green with envy about our perceived inability to overhaul our own lives. In many cases, their decisions and shifts sound easy, but in reality, they came with sleepless nights and all kinds of self-doubt and questioning. However, the

// Your purpose is likely not your own. It is something that has been beaten into you through some combination of influences that include your family, friends, and the media. //

key to these individuals’ success is that they were open to trying something new. What have you done to challenge yourself lately? As drastic as my words are, your actions need not be. Finding your true purpose could be miles away, but it could also be around the corner; the key is that you’ll never know until you question yourself and are willing to experiment and potentially fail. This could mean leaving your job, but it also could just mean bringing a different mindset and personal objective to your current job; spending time with new people that inspire you in different ways; picking up new hobbies that explore different parts of your mind; or dropping old habits. By shedding yourself of the historical beliefs that limit you, you empower yourself to do something truly different and, ideally, something that aligns more with what you really want. Personally, I’m still somewhere in the mud. However, I’m trying to experiment and with each arduous step forward, I’m rewarded for my masochism by gaining some glimmer of an understanding of true happiness. With only a few steps behind me, I have already started to understand that my visions of grandeur are, in fact, delusions. I love the idea of the big picture, but the reality is that I often get lost in it and become anxious trying to define such an all-encompassing vision in this increasingly large, complex, and interconnected world. Lately, I find myself taking greater pleasure and finding my purpose in small acts that, when they come together, create larger meaning. I’ve begun to see my fool’s errand of attempting to rewrite history when so much of the writing is out of my hands. Instead, I am seeing the value in using my energy to plant thousands of tiny seeds into the topsoil of history to see which may take root. In the end, it is possible that none of them will – but at least this way I get to enjoy the process of planning and sharing with others. I no longer need to plan for months, or even years, before my vision manifests as little more than disappointment and exhaustion. Forget your original purpose; you likely don’t believe in it anyway. Find a new one – one that you actually care about. Be selfish, and challenge your own motivations. Question whether your intent is your own or whether it is based on someone else’s needs or wants. It won’t be easy to confront these things, and it won’t be easy to decide what to do next. You’ll fail a lot, you’ll get worse before you get better, and you won’t immediately see the value in your actions. But keep going. Start small. You never know what things can grow into. //// Shane Saunderson is a PhD student in robotics at the University of Toronto and former VP, IC/ things at Idea Couture.

Reclaiming Aging

Finding Purpose in Later Life BY FIO N A H U G H ES, M D

By providing us with a healthy orientation to the future, a sense of purpose increases wellbeing – especially in later life.

PHOTO: CRISTIAN NEWMAN

“Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose.” —Viktor Frankl

Purpose Increases Health in Later Life

Purpose Provides Direction

Retirement age is often experienced as a time of loss. Not only of the opportunities of youth, but also of a sense of purpose. And if purpose declines, so too does health and wellbeing. This is because of the strong correlation between having a purpose in life and the increased will to live. This is one important finding to come out of a 20-year study, Midlife in the United States (MIDUS), conducted at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin. Lead researcher Dr. Carol Ryff, and Stacey Schaefer, who managed the neuroscience portion of the study, found that regardless of age or health status, people aged 20 to 70 who have a purpose in life are less likely to die within 10 years. Having purpose makes it easier for people to recover from negative life events, conferring a protective quality that makes them more resilient to stress. Similarly, in the study “Purpose in Life as a Psychosocial Resource in Healthy Aging,” researchers Nia Fogelman and Dr. Turhan Canli found that cortisol – an indicator of stress found in the blood – decreases as purpose in life increases. The same study indicated that having a strong sense of purpose is associated with reduced mortality and a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or having a heart attack. Unlike other life phases that are defined by schooling, marriage, raising a family, or earning a living, later life is relatively undefined. Except, of course, by investment advisors who would have everyone financially secure and eager to retire by 55, finally free to enjoy life on the golf course or aboard a cruise ship. As this phase lacks definition, there is a general assumption that purpose in life automatically declines after an individual has reached the pinnacle of their career. Rather than seeing this lack of definition around purpose in older age as a problem to be solved, we should recognize that this lack of expectation is what makes later life an ideal time to redefine individual purpose beyond purse strings and the nine-to-five grind.

Part of the reason purpose is healthy is because it motivates people and helps them organize their behavior in pursuit of achieving goals. For example, if a person thinks the purpose of work is to apply and grow their skills, or to make a meaningful contribution, they will approach their work differently than they would if they thought its purpose was “just” to pay the bills. People do many things in life randomly or to fulfill some sort of obligation – but purposeful work is something done with intent or even enthusiasm. There has been a great amount of emphasis placed on the idea that millennials value purposeful work more than other generations. However, one could argue that purpose is actually something that becomes more important the older an individual gets. Having purpose helps people shape their lives – a good thing regardless of age. But a sense of purpose may be especially helpful as people age and begin to feel the need to conserve their energy for the things they value most, including spending time reflecting on their lives or making a meaningful contribution.

Purpose Orients People to the Future The erosion of stable jobs and pensions in recent years has created a sense of uncertainty around work – especially for those who were taught that hard work today means stability tomorrow. For many, this is a sad and distressing new reality. The worry over the loss of stable work parallels fears over the loss of youth: It makes people fearful of the future. So, how can these individuals reorient themselves to the future in a more positive way? Beginning a new journey, such as starting a new job, can be difficult regardless of one’s age, as branching out requires more intentional effort than sticking to the status quo does. It also requires one to look forward with an attitude of trust, rather than fearing the unknown. Becoming more open to change requires people to slow down or step aside from the relentless pressures of passing time – something that should, in theory, be easier for people later in life when they aren’t in such a hurry. By taking this time to embrace and connect with the future, an older individual may develop a renewed sense of purpose. In doing so, they may discover that they’re no longer so stressed out about the future.

Launching a second “encore” career, starting a new business, or making the decision to mentor younger employees are just a few ways that those close to retirement can open themselves to the future and develop a renewed sense of purpose. In the US, self-employment among those of retirement age is rising, with 4.5 million Americans aged 50-70 engaged in an encore career and another 31 million wishing they had one. Obviously, there are many people who will need to continue working past the traditional retirement age out of financial necessity; however, for those who have the freedom to start a new career or move to a new place, redefining their purpose could help them link the present with the future during what is typically an unstable time of transition. Older individuals may also find an increased sense of purpose and health in less formal types of work, such as providing assistance to one’s community in response to a natural disaster or volunteering as a literacy tutor at a local school.

Reclaiming Later Life as a Purpose-Driven Time Having purpose strengthens the connection individuals have to the future. The opportunity to redefine one’s purpose in later life is a privilege for those lucky enough, financially stable enough, and supported enough by family, friends, and community members. The intention and conscious effort that an individual must dedicate to creating purpose can help order their life and improve their health. Rather than mourning later life as a time of decline in which career and family obligations lessen and health problems accumulate, people should embrace it as a time when they are finally free to do something unexpected and of their own creation: a time of greater purpose, enhanced health, and improved wellbeing. Knowing that doing work with purpose increases wellbeing, how can businesses help older adults develop and realize their encore careers and passion projects? //// Fiona Hughes is a resident MD at Idea Couture.

Rebranding Purpose BY A N N A R O U M I A N T S E VA

Having lived on the West Coast for several years now, I’ve gotten used to being asked things like “What is your calling?” at dinner parties. These questions used to always take me aback; I would awkwardly stand and swirl my wine around in circles trying to come up with something bohemian, yet coherent, to say. But what was

After (Customer centricity)

even more unsettling to me was that I had never given the issue enough thought to have a crisp answer ready. Though I had been advised by dozens of career coaches over the years, the purpose question had never come up. I didn’t know what my purpose was, but it was clear that it had to be something aspirational and greater than myself – after all, it was my reason for existing in the world. I knew that if I asked someone the same question and heard something like “to make coffee” or “to sell t-shirts” in response, I’d likely be underwhelmed. It got me thinking about purpose on a grander scale. In the business world, we treat corporations like individuals, giving them the same legal rights and freedoms as our fellow humans. So, when it comes to having purpose, why do we hold ourselves to a high standard, yet we find it perfectly normal for the companies that run so much of the world around us to have little sense of purpose at all? Why are we OK with the vast majority of companies being built around generating profit with no thought to the change they aim to create in the world? In large part, this thinking has to do with a belief that has become a doctrine of the corporate world: that above all else, corporations

ILLUSTRATIONS: SALI TABACCHI

Before (Shareholder centricity)

have a single and paramount obligation to maximize returns for shareholders. While that myth has been debunked by lawyers and economists time and time again in recent years, it has seeped deep into the psyche of corporate America. And yet it’s simply not true. As Jack Welch said, “On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. It is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers, and your products – not your shareholders.” A corporate executive isn’t an employee of the shareholders: she’s an employee of the corporation. As such, it is up to her to define what the raison d’être of the company will be – and by no means does it have to be profit at all costs. Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever argue in “The Capitalist’s Dilemma” (published in Harvard Business Review in June 2014) that because capital was once scarce, corporate America was built around the principle that companies must be primarily evaluated on how efficiently they deploy capital. Return on investment quickly became king, which bred a focus on short-term decision making and a prevailing view that the corporation is a machine for creating financial surplus and distributing it to shareholders. But this is no longer the world we live in. Today, capital is abundant, and our engrossing obsession with efficiency is no longer relevant. By looking beyond traditional ROI metrics, corporations can gain the leeway needed to take a more long-term strategic view, be more disruptive, and increase their impact – in other words, they can reimagine themselves as an engine to create real value in the world. As Kenneth Mason so aptly explains, “Making a profit is no more the purpose of a corporation than getting enough to eat is the purpose of life. Getting enough to eat is a requirement of life; life’s purpose, one would hope, is somewhat broader and more challenging. Likewise with business and profit.” So how do we spread this view? How do we reposition purpose as something that every company should bake into its core? Approaching this same challenge for a product would be considered a “branding” issue: an issue of changing how companies (and, more importantly, the people who run them) think about purpose. While there are many definitions of what a brand is, a common one is “the personification of a product or company.” It seems all too appropriate, then, to take a branding lens to this challenge of realigning corporations to be more human in their approach to purpose. A great example of a similar type of rebranding in recent years was that of “customer centricity” as a core business tenet, in which the customer emerged from behind the shareholder as the primary person a business is meant to serve. A small subset of companies, including Apple, Whole Foods, and Amazon, led the charge by embracing the ethos of delighting the customer as their primary objective. This strategy made a lot of sense (and, consequently, a lot of profit). It therefore spread like wildfire across the business community, with everyone scrambling to design think their way to innovation. Suddenly, being user-centric was a necessity. How do we rebrand purpose in the same way? How do we take it from being a fluffy, optional nice-to-have that a small subset of “do-good’er” companies have and transform it into a mandatory table-stakes element that every organization must define for itself? How do we rebrand purpose as something practical, rather than something purely aspirational? What might a brand’s statement of purpose look like if they were to take all of this into account?

Looking Ahead: The New, Purposeful Brand Statement

Target: Corporate leadership (C-suite executives).

Positioning Statement: For corporate leaders, purpose is the rationale that explains why the world can’t live without them.

3 Brand Pyramid: a/ Functional Benefits: Point of differentiation from competitors; clear guiding principles that tell employees what to do in various situations; attracts employees that subscribe to what the organization is doing/building in the world; sets guard rails for strategic decision making and makes explaining decisions to investors easier. b/ Emotional Benefits: Happy/loyal customers and inspired/ motivated/united employee base. c/ Brand Essence/Promise: Creates a sense of identity for the corporation and everyone it touches (a rallying cry/glue for everything the organization does).

Brand Values: Responsibility, conviction, intentionality.

Brand Archetype: A caregiver or “bread winner” whose stake-holders rely on it.

// How do we reposition purpose as something that every company should bake into its core? //

If – or, hopefully, when – the business community embraces the new way of looking at purpose outlined above, we must ensure that it is easy for them to act on it and integrate it into the tools they’re using every day to make decisions. I propose starting with the business model canvas – one of the most fundamental tools that any entrepreneur picks up when starting a new venture. Adding a “Purpose” box to the top of the canvas could help ensure that every business launched from here on out has a purpose baked into its core from day one. A common piece of advice in the professional world is to be “so good they can’t ignore you.” Let’s make every corporate leader want to be so good for the world that they can’t be ignored. Now when I get asked at a dinner party what my calling is, I say, “To prompt those around me to question their assumptions and look at the world through a new lens.” It’s what I do as an innovation strategist in my day job, and it’s what I try to also do consistently in my personal life. Sometimes that leads to better products and higher profits, and sometimes it just leads to a better, more interesting world. //// Anna Roumiantseva is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

The Business Model Canvas Purpose

Key Partners

Key Activities

Value Proposition

Key Resources

Cost Structure

Customer Relationships

Channels

Revenue Streams

Customer Segments

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urpose, long the domain of startups and non-profits, has finally entered the world of the large corporation. While traditional business goals surrounding profit growth, expansion, and innovation persist, they are being increasingly built on the foundation of a greater corporate mission. By embracing the spirit of the startup while leveraging the scale of the multinational, many organizations are reaching wider consumer groups with more authentic and meaningful offerings. With so many companies feeling the pressure to define their “purpose” as one that goes beyond just profit, it’s no surprise that there is a sense of ambiguity around exactly what a corporate purpose should be. Often, the ethical obligations of a business become conflated with its greater purpose, with words like “authenticity,” “accountability,” and “transparency” frequently coming up in conversations and blog posts alike. Together, these qualities comprise a minimum standard of operation – one that all organizations should be held accountable to, whether they strive to be “purposeful” or not. So, what is the difference between an ethical company and a purpose-driven one? Is it possible to better quantify an organization’s purpose through a mission statement and other official objectives, or do such tools miss the mark when it comes to defining what it means to be a purposeful company? To explore these questions, we spoke with representatives from five organizations, ranging from large and established corporations like PepsiCo and Shopify, to newer players like easy. Though we heard about purpose in the context of five separate industries – insurance, ecommerce, food and beverage, research, and feminine hygiene products – we were able to glean one clear and overreaching takeaway from these very different conversations: On its own, a company cannot have a purpose. Only if its employees are able to bring their own personal goals, values, and motivations to their work can a company truly be purpose-driven – and when the team is unified in their purpose, so too will the company have a central reason for being. Each conversation we had opened our eyes to how purpose can be made tangible, regardless of industry or company size. We hope you enjoy reading the insights our participants shared. Taylor Dennis is an editor at Idea Couture.

EXPLORING

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PURPOSE-DRIVEN MAURO PORCINI JOINED PEPSICO IN 2012 AS CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER, WHERE HE WORKS TO INFUSE DESIGN THINKING INTO PEPSICO’S CULTURE, PRODUCTS, AND BRANDS. PRIOR TO JOINING PEPSICO, HE SERVED AS CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER AT 3M. HE

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SITS ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE DESIGN MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE, ON THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE ITALY-AMERICA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, AND ON THE ADVISORY COUNCIL OF OTHER DESIGN AND ART INSTITUTIONS.

MAURO PORCINI SVP & CHIEF DESIGN OFFICER, PEPSICO

ithin large corporations, each employee should have an acute awareness of their own purpose as an individual. Each person must also be accountable for how they treat those around them, the brand(s) they support, and the performance of the corporation overall. It is essential for organizations to take the time to consider the “purpose-driven identity” being projected both within and outside of the business. We spoke with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo’s SVP and Chief Design Officer, to gain some insight into how he views his individual purpose and what he believes the purpose of design within PepsiCo is. He also gave some advice on leveraging one’s individual purpose to help inspire the design of a brand’s purpose.

87 How have you been able to define purpose for your team and to cultivate a culture of design as PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer? Purpose is essentially the point of view of a person or a brand; it is a way of looking at life. It should, and must, be applied to us first as human beings, as individuals, and then as professionals for the brand or company we represent. [These applications] must be aligned in order for the individual’s purpose and the purpose of the company to have mutual success. I am a designer at heart; that is my personal purpose for what I am doing at PepsiCo and what I was doing at 3M. Design drives me and helps me drive others. It’s part of my vision of wanting to design products that offer better experiences. I work for PepsiCo, where the CEO, Indra Nooyi, has made the primary mission statement and vision something called “Performance with Purpose.” This initiative hopes to enhance our planet’s sustainability and to help us make healthier choices in terms of the products that we create. It also focuses on taking care of society and the people within the company, and to do all this while performing and making a profit. As a designer working inside such a large organization, I aim to offer a pleasant experience that can impact people’s lives every single day – from when they wake up until they go to sleep. PepsiCo has such a diverse number of products that make up its portfolio, and we are given a very unique opportunity to design for a wide range of customers and business partners.

But there are also intangible aspects of the brand. Are you personally aligned to the brand? Are you what the brand stands for? That first impression in the fashion industry will speak to a hiring manager more than your resume will. The same goes for a designer’s portfolio and the kinds of projects or problems they are attracted to solving.

Now, what is the next challenge? Well, there are two levels of challenges: One is to align around what the purpose of the brand is and what it is not. The moment you take a position, you are going to be loved by some and eventually hated or not loved by others. A brand cannot be everything to all people. The second step starts with your own vision of and ideas for the world. You need to translate that purpose in your actions, which can be really difficult in big corporations at scale, because there are so many different people and partnerships, and they all must be aligned to the same brand purpose. It is a compelling design challenge to maintain consistency. The brand needs to act in the same way in different environments, but it must also be nuanced and able to adapt.

When you hire at a company like PepsiCo, or 3M, or at any other big company, how many people really look at how your style, body language, and personal mindset align with the brand? I am not sure it’s top of mind. Of course, some people may take this into consideration, but it’s not as obvious in large organizations. In the past, perhaps it wasn’t necessary. But today it definitely is. Because I have this awareness, I am trying to translate it into what PepsiCo does and how we hire. I believe that it’s necessary for one reason, and that lies in the power of authenticity. Brands need to create meaning for people and become meaningful to them – otherwise, people are not going to buy in. Because people have so many choices and channels, you need to be authentic – and this stems from how you hire.

How I typically think about it is as follows: I am a person, I have a vision, I have a purpose in life that gives meaning to myself, and I act on it consistently, 24/7. If I did that in an inconsistent way, I would lose all my credibility, but I act in a consistent way. Now, consistency doesn’t mean uniformity, it doesn’t mean that you are always the same,

Would you encourage emerging designers looking for opportunities to first understand their own purpose and then seek out the brands that best reflect their own beliefs or personality?

Y O U N E E D T O C R E AT E AWA R E N E S S I N

I have met with many young designers over the past year. I am a mentor to a designer in New York, and a lot of these young designers have a purpose. They want to be doing something good in life and working on projects that promote sustainability, so they dream of working for startups and small companies. I think we should have as many of those companies, startups, and designers as possible.

T H E C O M PA N Y T H AT A B R A N D W I T H O U T PURPOSE DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE.

How have you been able to define purpose for your team and to cultivate a culture of design as PepsiCo’s Chief Design Officer?

In the case of PepsiCo, I can think of brands like Gatorade, Mountain Dew, Naked Juice, and Doritos. We have iconic brands. We have brands with very, very well-defined positioning, equity, and points of view, and we can look to them to create a benchmark and say, “We could do something like this with this new brand” because of the brand’s well-established personality. The first step is to leverage examples from within or outside of the company and look to others for inspiration. You need to create awareness in the company that a brand without purpose doesn’t make any sense. I think it’s pretty obvious to everybody that brands need to have purpose nowadays, considering the advances that have been made within the marketing industry.

My advice to these designers is to not rule out big corporations. Of course, they have positives and negatives to them, but they’re able to reach millions with their designs. And at PepsiCo, we’re a big corporation that has something unique: our people and their drive to do purposeful work.

and it doesn’t mean you are going to be boring. The same is true for when you have to design purpose for a brand. To sum up, in order to be clear about your purpose, you need to communicate it to the entire organization, continuously look within and outside of the organization for inspiration, and behave in a consistent way, both as a representative of yourself and of your company. When you’re looking to build an in-house design team, how do you know if someone will naturally champion the branded experience or defend the brand’s design principles? In some industries, where the position of the brand is very clear – like in fashion – this is something that is pretty obvious. In fashion, you have to look like you represent the brand. You are the product. Your body language is the product. Your belief system is the product. Your style and way of thinking is the product. So the two must be one.

PHOTO: PEPSICO

First of all, when you are lucky like I have been, you get to work on successful and iconic brands that are already established in society, such as 3M and PepsiCo; when you are less lucky, you don’t. So you need to look to brands outside of your company as examples and hope this will encourage your internal team to extract the relevant lessons.

If you are able to help steer the big enterprise that you work for from within, then you can help move it in the right direction. Of course, I say this as the head of design, who is intimately connected to the company – but this direction doesn’t need to come from the top. A junior designer can have just as much impact if they act with purpose on a day-to-day basis on the projects they work on. Then you can spread that kind of mindset to your colleagues, and you can really have a huge impact. Within a small company you may impact a few people, but at a large company a small change could be huge in terms of its impact on the world. Lee Fain is co-head, design strategy at Idea Couture.

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AWARD FOR 2017.

UNDER

or Sachin Aggarwal, CEO at Think Research, developing and using the tools required to create important change is what gives life to a purposeful organization. Which is why, after walking away from a corporate law career and completing a successful turn in federal politics, Aggarwal decided that it was time to undertake the next rewarding challenge: helping to build a healthcare software company from the ground up. From these efforts grew Think Research, a startup first conceived by Dr. Chris O’Connor in 2006 as a solution to the problem of disparate care and its negative effects on patient wellbeing. Today, Think Research operates with the same purpose at heart, helping clinicians across the world prioritize evidence-based care for patients.

91 How did you come to join Think Research? I was working in corporate law, which was tough for me. I found it to be really soul sucking. It was not at all rewarding. I didn’t feel like I was doing “me” for a while. I was a cog in a machine helping someone who I’d never met make a lot of money, shut down a company, or lay people off. It didn’t feel like a life I wanted to live. So I left. I went and worked in Canadian federal politics for a couple of years. I’d already been involved in politics for a number of years, running campaigns on the side as a volunteer. I ended up running Michael Ignatieff’s campaign to be the leader of the Liberal Party, and then I went to work for him in Ottawa after we won, where I served as the Deputy Chief of Staff. We weren’t in government, but I was able to effect a fair bit of change, even as a representative of the Opposition. After that, I never wanted to go back to something that didn’t make me feel good or excited about what I do. When I was leaving politics and moving back to Toronto, I was looking at a bunch of different options. I had offers from various law firms. I could have gone into corporate GR or something like that – or there was this little startup company that was struggling. It didn’t have enough money to meet payroll, but it had a really cool idea for how to transform healthcare. And so, I picked that struggling little five-person company. What does purpose mean to you? There are multiple aspects of purpose, in my view. You can have something that’s really meaningful to do, but you also have to layer in a sense of possibility. You have to put in place the pieces needed to be able to do what you want to do. Until all of those things come together, purpose alone is not sufficient. People can get disenchanted. There are lots of startups out there that are trying to change the world and do amazing things, but unless you’ve got a sense of possibility and you’ve got the tools – everything from cash, to know-how, to ability – put in place, then really all you have is an idea. And that’s not sufficient.

Where does Think Research and its purpose fit into the current healthcare context? Looking back through the last couple of centuries, the way that we cared for people was a form of art. The knowledge was held within a tiny number of individuals. They may have had some innate knowledge that helped them to practice their trade and be successful in certain circumstances, but there was no real evidence or information there. And then, the Industrial Revolution came. This began a scientific revolution, and the amount of information started to accelerate. It was only in 1992 that the term “evidence-based medicine” was coined. That’s actually pretty recent – that’s the concept that medicine is not an art, but a science. Since then, the amount of information being brought to bear in healthcare has just continued to accelerate. There are now thousands and thousands of publications per day in the biomedical sciences. But the amount of information that we’re bringing in is increasing [in a non-linear way]. It’s an accelerating growth spurt, and there’s a lot of evidence to show that, because we can’t keep up with this avalanche of information, we’re effectively processing extremely out-of-date medicine. You go to the doctor today, your doctor is practicing what was best practice about 15 to 17 years ago. On top of that, we have an aging population who are living longer with multiple comorbidities, and we’ve got very expensive drugs and treatments and medical devices coming to the market. The confluence of those factors – the accelerating rate of information, the change in our demographics, and the change in the cost of healthcare – means that we’re actually squeezing out the rest of what we can do as a society. Our healthcare costs are affecting our ability to spend on other valuable things, like education, defense, and roads (whether here or in the third world). Even things like space exploration, entertainment, or other things that matter to us – these are all being squeezed out, because we value healthcare more. As a consequence, we find ourselves in a precarious situation; if we don’t correct it, we’re going to be leading very, very different lives 10, 20, or 30 years from now. So, our mission at Think Research is a big mission: It’s to organize the world’s health knowledge so everyone gets the best care. Inherent to that is the need to make the whole process more efficient. When you practice in an evidence-based way, better outcomes come with lower costs.

UNLESS YOU’VE GOT A SENSE OF POSSIBILITY AND YOU’VE GOT THE TOOLS – EVERYTHING FROM CASH, TO KNOW-HOW, TO ABILITY – PUT IN PLACE, THEN R E A L L Y A L L YO U H AV E I S A N I D E A . A N D T H AT ’ S N O T S U F F I C I E N T.

What are some disruptive trends that will change the healthcare landscape? I think one subtle but meaningful trend is that our concept of privacy is going to change. As we start to realize that our data can help other people, what we’re willing to share about ourselves is going to change. In healthcare, that’s going to be really meaningful and material. With this, the concept of ownership of data is also going to evolve. I think there will be a confluence or convergence of several things that will happen simultaneously, which will dramatically affect healthcare. The way that we do scientific research today is the blinded study – and the limitations of that are incredible. In fact, if we were able to do giant observation studies on real-life health factors, the amount of high-quality evidence that we would be able to produce as a result would be mind-boggling. Ultimately, our approach to these things will change when we start to realize that we, as human beings, will receive multiple benefits too. It will happen when we realize, “I will get an indirect personal benefit from sharing my information because healthcare will improve.” There will be a societal impact – family, friends, and others will also benefit. And there might also be a monetary incentive. This is where technologies like blockchain will come into play; it’s not going to be big medical records companies that own the data and act as gatekeepers. It will actually be the individual who, over time, gives access to their personal information, and therefore gets a personal benefit. Healthcare organizations tend to have a high level of scrutiny and a very difficult sales cycle for prospective service providers. What is it about Think Research that inspires trust in these challenging clients?

PHOTO: SAMUEL ZELLER

First of all, the software has to be intuitive. It has to be easy. We put clinical content into our software. We’re not just healthcare software. Trust is at the very core of what we do. We have to start from trust – we don’t end with trust. We don’t try to create trust after we deploy. If our clients didn’t trust us, they would never buy our solutions. The moment they buy our solutions, they are using our content. We are helping them make their decisions on how to treat patients. They’re fundamentally licensing trust from us, and so that’s what we sell.

A S W E S TA R T T O R E A L I Z E T H AT O U R D ATA C A N H E L P O T H E R P E O P L E , W H AT WE’RE WILLING TO SHARE ABOUT O U R S E L V E S I S G O I N G TO C H A N G E .

How do you inspire your employees to maintain a singular vision of what Think Research is? First, prospective employees are screened for aptitude and ability. Then, we hire based on values and culture – that’s the final screen. Of course, as we add people, our culture is going to migrate. But if we’re hiring within the general four walls of our values, then it will migrate much more slowly. As we get bigger, it does get harder and harder. We have to put structures in place to minimize the impact of growth to our culture, or to maximize our culture within a bigger frame. So, we’ve implemented things like various communication structures. For example, every single person in our company is involved in a daily huddle of some sort. Some are involved in more than one to ensure that communication and transparency are being pushed out and that feedback keeps coming back in. There are a variety of tools and tasks that we can use to try to maintain culture as we grow. But being very explicit about the definition of that culture is a big part of it. Think Research currently has a very strong presence in Canada. Do you have a long-term vision for where you hope the company will expand in the next 5-10 years? We are exporting as much as we can, as fast we can. We’re building teams to export aggressively to the US. We have a number of clients now in the EU and the Middle East. Our goal is to have our mission applied to everybody around the world. Kuhan Perampaladas is a health innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

C R E AT I N G A N AUTHENTIC

ME EN NS STT R U AT I O N A N D W O M E N ’ S H E A L T H A R E M ES STTIILLLL LLA ARRG GEELLYY UN ND DE ER R--D DIIS SC CU US SS E D A N D U UN ND DE ER - R E P R E S E N T E D TO P I C S – U ES SP E C I A L L Y I N N O N - W E S TTE E ER RN NC CO OU UN N TTR RIIE ESS..

AND HONEST BRAND ALYSSA BERTRAM IS THE CEO AND FOUNDER THAT

EASY.,

DELIVERS

SERVICE

100%

ORGANIC

COTTON FEMININE HYGIENE PRODUCTS

EASY. ITS

CUSTOMERS’

DONATES

PROFITS

FOUNDATION, THAT TO ALYSSA BERTRAM CEO & FOUNDER, EASY.

TO AN

DELIVERS

KENYAN

PORTS

THE

SANITARY ALYSSA

MOVEMENT

ACCESS

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AND

ZANAAFRICA

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PORTION

ORGANIZATION

MENSTRUAL ALL

WITH A PURPOSE

AND

SUPEND

PROMOTE

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PADS

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lyssa Bertram, founder of Easy Period (styled as “easy.”), has set out to change that. easy. delivers feminine hygiene products made of 100% organic cotton to its customers’ doors. The company sends a portion of the profits from each sale to ZanaAfrica Foundation, an organization that works to provide education and sanitary products to girls in Kenya. With these efforts, Alyssa is working to remove the stigma surrounding menstruation. easy. is doing more than providing a convenient service – it is reimagining what the menstruation industry should look like, how we should be talking about it, and how these changes and conversations will impact women all around the world. At the core of the company is the notion of removing shame from all matters of women’s health. As for the brand’s self-proclaimed purpose, it’s simple: empowering women. We chatted with Alyssa about her journey to creating easy., her plans for the future, and her thoughts on why brands need to be purposeful in order to stay competitive.

97 What motivated you to start easy.? I’d had the idea of a tampon delivery service for years, but I hadn’t taken any steps toward acting on it. It was more of an idea that I’d tell friends about when we were having late-night chats about what we’re really passionate about. It wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that I decided to do something about it. Things got really shaken up in my life because my mom got very sick. It was a scary time, but thankfully she’s healthy today. As soon as I knew she was going to be ok, I had a moment of realization and a renewed sense of energy. I felt fired up and had clarity about what was next for me. I knew that I had to act on my idea. This experience opened my eyes to the need to build something that really mattered to me – any fears that I had around it before no longer mattered. I was working in healthcare research at the time and started doing some homework on how to get this thing off the ground. I started to delve into the history of the tampon as well, and what I learned from some medical journals was pretty disturbing. There are a lot of legal loopholes in the space, such as companies not being legally bound to list the materials used in their products. There are a number of chemicals and carcinogens in a lot of tampons, as well as synthetic fibers that can shed in the vaginal walls. Reading these things inspired me to look for an alternative. I started buying organic cotton tampons at the health food store, and it was then that I decided that I would only sell products that I would use myself. How do you define easy.’s purpose as a brand? I was asked that question really early on, and the answer was easy for me: My goal has always been to empower women. Working at the hospital [in healthcare research], I often felt stifled and bored, and I wanted to create a business that felt empowering, inspiring, and honest. A lot of marketing that was being done toward me and my age group didn’t feel authentic or true to me – and I wanted to create not only a service, but also a brand and a community where we could be authentic and just tell the truth. Would you say that your company’s purpose filters into every element of your business (packaging, online presence, ad copy, etc.)? Or is it more of a general guiding light or mission statement?

PHOTO: EYE FOR EBONY

M Y G OA L H AS A L WAY S B E E N TO EMPOWER WOMEN.

In terms of packaging and branding, I think I’ve always been drawn to simplicity. As soon as I had the name, I went to get a logo designed by a friend. I said to her, “I don’t want any bullshit. I don’t want anything above and beyond the simplest way of conveying our name.” That’s what she provided, and I’m really happy with it. I think it’s empowering when you speak to somebody and you assume that they’re intelligent, rather than using marketing tactics that speak to them in a way that assumes they’re not intelligent. It’s critical for brands to

speak to their audience as intelligent consumers. I just want to be honest with my audience. Another thing that’s critical to me is the fact that we’re not selling a product that people don’t need, and I don’t think I could do that. Menstruation products are necessary, but I’m also very open about the fact that women have other options aside from tampons. I find this approach empowering, so I definitely think our purpose permeates through all the layers of the business. How do you think easy. differs from other startups in the menstruation and education space? I think that what differentiates us is that we’re really trying to be representative. I’ve been fortunate enough to have women reach out to me with unique stories that aren’t necessarily being told elsewhere. This is how I’ve heard about what it’s like to live with endometriosis as a successful entrepreneur, or to be a former Olympian and a disability activist and how that impacts your menstrual cycle. These sorts of stories get people to think about menstruation in a different way. It’s not just about when you bleed and the products you use – it’s a cycle that takes place throughout a menstruating person’s life all month, and it affects them in different ways at different points. Thinking about this individually is important, but looking at someone else’s experience is key as well. For example, [it’s important to know about the experience of] a Kenyan woman who has to go to a local agency to get her products, or that of a young girl in Kenya who isn’t even being taught about her period at all. The charity that we work with, ZanaAfrica Foundation, has come up with a magazine to help teach women and young girls about this topic as they start menstruating. I want to give people a chance to tell their stories and to look outside their own experience.

How will your purpose continue to shape your future plans as you continue to grow?

What other purpose-driven brands do you take inspiration from?

Right now, things are developing and changing for us. We’re currently using our manufacturer’s packaging, but moving forward we want to be able to differentiate ourselves further through branded packaging. This is another space to innovate and be honest with our consumers. We’re including our subscribers in our iterative innovation process, so we’re doing things like limited runs and then surveying people to see what speaks to them. We’re going to keep it a two-way street, because the individuals who subscribe to this service are why it exists, and their feedback is valuable. It’s all about transparency and empowering people by bringing them into the decision-making process.

Two that come to mind are Reformation, a company that is innovating in the fashion space and helping women think about waste, and Everlane, which is really big on transparency about their materials and cost. Another one is Kotn, an impressive organization that is in close touch with the cotton famers they work with.

These days, consumers have a variety of options in almost every industry. So why should the menstruation industry be different? Menstruation is still looked at as taboo, so I’m excited to be involved during this crucial wave that’s rethinking this space.

BY JUST BEING AUTHENTIC AND BEING AWA R E O F T H E FAC T T H AT T H I N G S TA K E T I M E TO GROW, I THINK I CAN C R E AT E M E S S A G I N G T H AT R E S O N AT E S W I T H THE AUDIENCE I’M T R Y I N G TO AT T R A C T.

Can you tell us some more about the corporate social responsibility side of easy. and your relationship with ZanaAfrica? As I mentioned, when I started easy. I was doing a lot of research about the field and the toxicities involved in most tampons, and I was really disturbed by that. But I was also disturbed to learn that 80% of girls and women in East Africa have no access to menstrual hygiene products. It became a no-brainer to me at that point that I would tag onto my convenient service the ability for women to seamlessly give back to other women.

PHOTOS: AMEVI WISDOM, ANNIE SPRATT

I think the individual who’s willing to pay a little bit more for organic products to come to their door is likely to be interested in supporting other women. I looked for organizations that were involved in this kind of work, and I was really impressed with ZanaAfrica. They’re looking to constantly innovate – they work to make pads more environmentally friendly, they run health education workshops, and they created the magazine I mentioned earlier, which is so beautiful and thoughtful. They’re tackling a combination of things. They’re trying to work against the vicious cycle of girls not having access to menstrual products and dropping out of school to deal with it, as well as the general lack of education about menstruation that persists in [East African] culture. Basic teaching can help cut off the taboos that are still being permeated.

Brands like these create end-to-end stories, and they show their customers [where their products are coming from]. I like to learn and to know where my things are coming from – so having that easily accessible makes me feel connected to a brand. Any final thoughts? For me, it’s really about being authentic. Someone once said to me, “What you’re sharing today is speaking to the girl who is where you were this time last year.” That really resonated with me – thinking that there’s somebody who’s on the brink of starting something he or she is passionate about, and they’re looking at my story and thinking, “Oh, maybe it is possible. She seems to have done this.” It really motivates me to keep being authentic. I don’t need to pretend that my brand is bigger than it is or growing faster than it is. By just being authentic and being aware of the fact that things take time to grow, I think I can create messaging that resonates with the audience I’m trying to attract. I look to other brave women to give me permission, and I think the more you’re honest about what you’re going through, the more it gives other people a voice. Mira Blumenthal is lead editor, communications at Idea Couture.

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INSPIRING

OR RS SO OM ME EB BR RA AN ND DS S, H HAV AV I N G A N I N S P I R I N G P U R P O S E I S A S S I M P L E FFO E AS SB BE I N G T T H E B E S T AT W H AT A AT YO Y OU U DO O..

BRAND ALISON BRAND

FLEMING

STRATEGY

SHOPIFY.

WITH

LEADS

THE

PRACTICE

OVER

DECADE

OF EXPERIENCE, SHE WAS PREVIOUSLY

L OYA L T Y

COMMUNICATIONS

NER

TAXI,

360

COMMUNICATIONS

PLAN-

CONSULTING PLANS

ON FOR

CLIENTS SUCH AS KRAFT, PFIZER CONSUMER

HEALTHCARE,

LEON’S,

AND SIRIUS XM. PRIOR TO THAT, SHE WAS AT EDELMAN, WHERE SHE WORKED

FIRST

STRATEGIST

AND

DIGITAL

THEN

PLANNER FOR CLIENTS INCLUDING PAYPAL,

UNILEVER,

BLACKBERRY.

ALISON FLEMING DIGITAL STRATEGIST & PLANNER, SHOPIFY

GTAA,

AND

his is the motivation that drives Shopify forward in its goal to reach the greatest number of entrepreneurs possible, and it’s the goal that drives Alison Fleming, Shopify’s brand strategy lead, ever forward in her pursuit to make Shopify a purposeful brand.

With over a decade of experience, Alison has worked as both a digital strategist and planner for several large brands, including PayPal, Unilever, and BlackBerry. She has also consulted for clients such as Kraft, Pfizer, and Sirius XM. Considering her extensive background and current position in brand strategy, we were excited to ask Alison some questions about her thoughts on the role of purpose in branding.

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103

ENSURE THAT “BRAND PURPOSE” AND “BRAND TRUTH” ARE SYNONYMS. WHEN YOU LOSE THE PLOT ON THAT, YOU BECOME INAUTHENTIC AND PUT YOURSELF AT RISK OF PANDERING.

We strive to make commerce better for everyone – a lofty and complex goal, but one that has a deep impact on our culture. At the surface, this drives us to create more seamless, contextual experiences for buyers and sellers alike. This reduces all the bad parts about making a purchase (perusing shelves for hours, entering your credit card information, etc.) and allows us to experience more of the good (an immersive popup or an empathetic web experience). How does this differ from your mission statement, if at all? Our mission is to take the path that leads to more entrepreneurs. It’s a North Star that helps our organization make the best decisions for our merchants. We believe that when there are more entrepreneurs and greater differentiation within the market, our economies are stronger, more vibrant, and more sustainable. We believe that more entrepreneurs will lead to better commerce for everyone. Would you say the various departments within Shopify have different purposes? If so, how do you work to align them? We all work toward the same purpose, but we have very different mandates under that purpose. I think it’s import-

ant to have a separation of church and state between strategy and creative, otherwise the strategy is biased. Strategy is obsessed with our end audience – what compels them, what their hopes and dreams are, what they believe about us and the culture we all inhabit together. When we can crack that, design can stay focused on making beautiful things that spark a meaningful connection with the brand.

How is Shopify disrupting the retail space, and what are your plans for the future? We want to work with our merchants to help invent a new future of retail that’s more empathetic and enjoyable for customers. How does your purpose and/or mission as an organization help to shape these plans?

Looking at the world of business beyond Shopify specifically, how do you think purpose in business has evolved over time, and where do you think it’s going?

The word “better” in our purpose is important. It’s important that we’re not endeavoring to make things easier or faster – instead, we want to make them “better.” When commerce is better, you might not need it to be faster or easier, because you enjoy the experience so much.

The phrase “purpose-driven brand” is terribly overused and has, unfortunately, led to a number of brands jumping the shark. It feels like it’s a race to the bottom for how much a brand can make you feel, versus exactly what it can make you feel. It has turned into quantity, not quality; if something makes you cry and call your mother, then it’s deemed a success. Can you share some advice on how to design with purpose? Ensure that “brand purpose” and “brand truth” are synonyms. When you lose the plot on that, you become inauthentic and put yourself at risk of pandering.

What do you think entices people to use Shopify and stay loyal? Is there something beyond your service offering that shapes your ethos as a company and that draws people to your brand? We are obsessed with our merchants and their success. PHOTO: SAMUEL ZELLER

How does Shopify define its purpose as a company?

How do you inspire your employees and colleagues to share in the Shopify purpose? As our VP of UX says, we “stay close to the front line” and ensure everyone in the organization stays connected to the merchants who use our platform. We’re a compli-

cated product and need to ensure this merchant empathy pervades everything we do so that we’re helping those who rely on our platform to be as successful as possible. Which other brands do you consider “purposeful,” and who do you look to for inspiration? In terms of the amount of trust people need to have in our brand, I equate us with a bank. That, contrasted with our need to inspire entrepreneurs to take the leap into business, means that we need to be as inspiring as Nike. In terms of brands that are “banks who behave like Nike,” we look to our Canadian peers, Wealthsimple and Tangerine. Taylor Dennis is an editor at Idea Couture.

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INSURANCE

HE E IIN ND DU US ST T R I E S I N G R E AT E S T N E E D O F C H A N G E A R E TTH E O FFTTE EN N HO OS SE M MO OS ST T R E S I S TA N T TO I N N O VAT TTH VATIIO ON N –– A AN ND D TTH HE E IIN NS SU UR RA AN NC CE E ND DU USSTT R Y I S O F T E N A C U L P R I T. IIN

GETS

TIM

ATTIA

AND

CEO

IS OF

TECHNOLOGY

THE

COFOUNDER

SLICE

STARTUP

LABS,

PROVIDING

ON-DEMAND

INSURANCE

FOR

THE

ON-DEMAND

ECONOMY.

FOR

THE

PAST

YEARS,

WITH

MAJOR

CARRIERS

GLOBAL

APPLY

HAS

WORKED

INSURANCE

TECHNOLOGY

DISTRIBUTION. TO

AND

EXCITED

INTELLIGENT

DESIGN,

DATA, AND TECHNOLOGY TO SOLVE THE GAPS AND RISKS FACING THE

D I G I TA L

GROWING

TIM ATTIA CEO OF SLICE

ON-DEMAND

WORKFORCE.

nter Slice, an insurance technology startup with its eye on the future. The digital platform, created by cofounders Tim Attia, Stuart Baserman, and Ernest Hursh, provides pay-per-use insurance to those working in the sharing economy. In addition to providing affordable on-demand protection for those in the ridesharing and homesharing business, Slice leverages the best of digital to provide a truly customer-centric, low-pressure experience. We spoke with Tim about what inspired him to start Slice, where the digital insurance model fits in the context of traditional coverage, and how creating innovation in a stale market is the purpose that drives the platform forward.

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We [Tim and Slice co-founder Stuart Baserman] first spent about 12 years building policy claims, and then we found out that the insurance industry was not interested in products. They had lines of business in home, or automobile, or life. If you said “product” then that implied “customer,” and they really didn’t want to have to worry about customers. So we got a really negative reaction. People literally wanted to throw us out of buildings because they didn’t want to hear about products [because they didn’t align with their] “lines of business.” There was an era during which insurance industries were trying to automate policy image and transactions, and they were doing all this manual work around policy, billings, claims, and expenses. They spent 20 years automating, spending billions and billions of dollars, and then the whole world changed on them. All of a sudden, it started being about customer engagement and had nothing to do with internal transactions. For five and a half years prior to Slice, we operated as arguably the first direct-to-consumer small commercial firm in the US. We created an online distributor, we had licensed agents in 50 states, and we offered an experience where a small business could purchase a policy directly online. What we learned from that was that it’s really expensive to distribute insurance, especially in the US, so we built a distribution platform. We thought we’d tackle it on the front end and leave the back end as it is. But that didn’t really work out, because we had to deal with every carrier’s outdated systems and processes, which added to our costs. Nothing was digitized; no one was online. What are some important lessons you took out of that initial experience? One thing we learned was that there were some massive gaps in the market. Four or five years ago, we started seeing startups in the sharing economy space coming to us for insurance. They were creating new kinds of risks and breaking regulations. For example, one of the indirect rules all small insurance companies in the US had was “two years in business” – they wouldn’t write a policy for any company with less than two years. Every one of these startups had less than two years in business. We realized that this was a significant opportunity area, and we knew we had to start from scratch, build from the bottom up, and try our best to not use any existing systems or processes. You wanted to build the model for Slice from the ground up. What were the other major drivers for your design of the business? [We had a few] core hypotheses or “what ifs.” First, we wondered, “What if insurance could be turned on and off

like a light switch?” Then, it was: “What if insurance was bought and not sold?” It’s a $5T industry, and the industry spends $1T of that $5T selling it.

Does being digital create any barriers for consumers in terms of the user experience? In the insurance industry, there are annual policies. When an insurance company sells a policy, they know that 85% [of customers] will renew. They don’t really want to talk to you because they don’t want you to find out that you’ve had no losses and you’re paying premiums, because you might cancel. It’s the only industry that really doesn’t want to interact with you.

The last question we tried to solve was: “What if you were just covered?” The whole idea of attaching insurance to assets – which, in the future, people might not even own anymore – doesn’t really make sense. [Instead, your coverage would be] attached to you, attached to your phone. There’s a different way to look at underwriting. We were fairly sure that we could innovate and that we could do so quickly. We knew we could likely build a whole insurance company faster than an existing insurance company could integrate a system, but we didn’t know if we could scale. It’s difficult to do that when the big players can spend millions on marketing. You’ve expressed that a digital approach to insurance sales doesn’t work within existing traditional models. What makes digital different?

You’re only a customer if you have a policy. If you have a one-year auto and home policy, there will be another company trying to figure out when your policy renews, because they know they can market to you after a certain date. So everybody’s after these renewal dates – other than aggressive companies, like GEICO and Progressive, who are just trying to acquire customers as much as possible.

BEING DIGITAL IS ABOUT TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE TECHNOLOGY THAT

We went [with a register and buy model], which is more standard in the online space. When somebody registers for Slice, we underwrite them. They haven’t bought a policy, but they are now a customer. They might buy a policy two weeks later for three nights, or when they go out [to drive for] Uber, but they’re a customer – regardless of when their home or auto insurance renews.

IS AVAILABLE TODAY AS WELL AS BEING AWARE OF WHAT TECHNOLOGY IS GOING TO BE AROUND

A lot of people talk about [using digital] for customer engagement. In the T H R E E Y E A R S F R O M insurance value chain, distribution is expensive. But what if you took the NOW, AND CONTINUOUSLY insurance company out of the value chain? We thought, if we eliminated INNOVATING. the insurance company, you can take between 35 and 45 cents off every premium dollar. Being digital in insurance, in our view, really puts a chink in the value chain. You do need an insurance carrier license, but there are no employees in that carrier – it completely reimagines the model.

We’re playing with convenience and with time. WeWork allows you to book an office online with your credit card and no five-year lease or commercial real estate broker; Amazon lets you lease infrastructure with a click and at “no cost” so you can get going; Netflix lets you watch shows on demand with much less of a commitment than cable companies – and I think we’re doing the same for insurance. We have no long application, no long contract, and you’re protected when you want to be. Building this new model has allowed us to learn a lot about the insurance space and how it needs to change. There’s an inherent advantage in the digital world that traditional insurance providers are going to have a problem with: It is a lot cheaper to acquire a customer online. And it’s going to be hard for them to overcome that without completely changing their model.

What are the benefits of digital as they relate to Slice more specifically? Being digital is about taking advantage of the technology that is available today as well as being aware of what technology is going to be around three years from now, and continuously innovating. We created a digital insurer, so we kind of eliminated the carrier. We have underwriting authority; we collect premiums into our bank account; and we take claims out of our bank account – we have claims authority. We don’t take any risks on the balance sheet. So while the reinsurer does enter the equation, rather than taking everything over a million, they’re taking everything down to dollar zero. Rather than having a billing system with a department filled with a bunch of people, we’re integrated into Stripe and Apple Pay. Our platform mirrors that of Uber or Airbnb. There are some societal issues with that; it’s totally new to people. And we’re constantly navigating that as we design our digital experiences.

Where do you ultimately see Slice fitting within the context of the insurance industry?

PHOTO: AHMED SAFFU

How did you first become involved in insurance?

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We went into a gap and created a product that can be embeddable, so obviously we’re talking with platforms about embedding our product in either a rideshare or homeshare platform. Now that we’re almost in all states, we’re going down that path. If you think about the large insurance providers in the US, they don’t sell what we have, because we’re filling a gap. Of course, they want to acquire customers cheaper and quicker, so they’re looking at our model and saying, “How can we have that?” However, we can’t scale; they can. They’re spending $1.2B, $1.6B, and we can’t do that. So we’re planning to launch a partnership with a large direct brand in the US.

What that will allow us to do is scale quickly and inexpensively within the US; rather than spending 300% of premium on acquisition, we’re going to spend 7%. We’re going to give up brand recognition, but then we’re going to have a platform that can scale. How would your company’s purpose complement or interfere with that of a more traditional organization? Our hypothesis is that many of the large carriers are going to want a digital insurer out of the box, and they’re going to want to license the whole experiment that is Slice. That’s how we can go global. That’s how we see us hyper-scaling our invention. Insurers are all saying, “We need to go digital,” and I think they recognize that they can’t do it within their current model – they really have to build something off to the side. There needs to be a recognition that we can innovate, but we can’t scale, and they have to agree that they can’t innovate but they can scale. If we can get to that arrangement, we could have an interesting model. I’m borrowing this idea from biotech, where 70% of new drugs are coming out of startups. I think the insurance industry needs something like that in order to stay relevant and resilient. Taylor Dennis is an editor at Idea Couture.

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PURPOSE

FORM FOLLOWS PERFECTION.

N O M AT T E R H O W L A R G E O R S M A L LL,, A C O M PA N Y I S O N L Y A S G O O D A S T H E P E O P L E B E H I N D I T.

he next generation of purpose-driven organizations will be those who recognize the importance of unifying their employees and consumers around a central purpose – one that balances the values and targets of the company while also serving the interests and improving the lives of those who work for and buy from them. Though success will never be easy to define, the days of linking a business’s progress and growth purely to financial gain are dwindling. Of course, increasing profits will always be a goal – but it should not and will not be the goal. Already, businesses are casting their eye to the future in ways that go far beyond the economic. This could mean capitalizing on employees’ skills and passions, as Mauro Porcini describes, to grow a major corporation like PepsiCo. It could come to fruition in a company’s hiring policies, which could emphasize recruiting employees with values that mesh with those of the corporation, a practice encouraged by Think Research CEO Sachin Aggarwal. Alternatively, a company could dedicate its operations to filling a gap to fulfill a currently unmet need, like Alyssa Bertram’s easy. or Tim Attia’s Slice. Of course, if it can’t communicate its purpose clearly and meaningfully to consumers, a company might as well not have a purpose at all. This is why branding will continue to be paramount to an organization’s success, regardless of the goals it has or the industry it operates within – an important point demonstrated by Shopify’s Alison Fleming. No matter the scope or ambition behind their goals, organizations cannot hope to achieve any of their ambitions without careful consideration and leveraging of their most valuable resources: their people. By learning to represent the interests of their stakeholders in more meaningful ways, these organizations – and plenty of future companies still to be conceived – will embody what it truly means to live and act with purpose. ////

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BY PAUL ROWA N

When I started Umbra 37 years ago, I only had one purpose: to keep it alive! We were in survival mode, doing anything we could to keep the doors open from one day to the next. In my experience – and I’m sure this is true for most startups in their early stages – we were just too busy to think about our company’s higher purpose. Eventually, we found our purpose in what we called “the democratization of design.” We saw an opportunity to design and reinvent everything found in the home, objects that had been the same for decades – from can openers, to coffee cups, to (of course) trash cans. We followed that purpose in every product we designed, and it led us to success. There was a global community that wanted what we wanted: access to well-designed products. If I were starting Umbra in 2018, would that same purpose still be enough? We had an easy enough problem to solve 37 years ago: functional items in the home were usually ugly. Our solution was to add design to these objects. Today, however, the world has had a taste of what good design looks like.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

FINDING A HIGHER PURPOSE WHEN SURVIVAL MODE ENDS

Just like any other startup, when we first launched we set out to solve a problem in the hopes that enough people would choose our solution. We weren’t thinking about a purpose beyond that goal. However, once a foothold was established in the market, we had to start thinking about the brand values that got us to that point. These were still early days, but when a higher purpose is discussed alongside operational and sales issues, then a truly amazing transformation can take place. Products are defined by their function; they don’t have purpose in and of themselves. I’ve seen thousands of products come and go. What endures is the brand – and great brands are embedded with purpose. At Umbra, our design team was reminded of our purpose daily, often opening meetings by going around the conference table repeating our key words: original, modern, functional, affordable, and innovative. These words guided our team to design and execute products that embodied our company values. Today almost everything is commodified – including artistic style and creative imaginations. The world is flooded with imaginative conceptual designs that stem from the use of biodynamic and generative design. However, these designs do little more than feed the imagination of those within the design profession – they have little to no real-world impact. This is where embedding purpose into the design of products and concepts can improve their real-world impact, in both the short and long term. Purpose is what turns designers into Designers with a big D. If a clear purpose is articulated for products and concepts, they can become platforms for experimentation, speculation, and reimagination of new meanings. These meanings can help power the consumer journey, allowing consumers to discover their own sense of purpose. I still remember Apple’s 1997 “Leave Your Mark” ad campaign, which demonstrated that the Macintosh computer is more than a computer: It is a tool to empower the mind. Along the way, your intended purpose might lead you to a purpose you didn’t expect. For over 25 years I was actively engaged in outreach programs with design universities around the world. The idea was to look for new product ideas, but we gained far more than that. By reaching out, we were able to recruit the finest emerging talent. The contributions that recent graduates made at Umbra were key to keeping the brand young and vital. We were always striving to set trends rather than follow them, and finding young designers with fresh ideas and new perspectives has helped us stay relevant. Today, Umbra’s most successful products are often designed by emerging talent, hired through early involvement with design institutions. Our VP of Design started as an intern 15 years ago, and many of the students we found through collaborations with schools like OCAD University in Toronto have gone on to become both great designers and great leaders. As a result of our work with students, a breakthrough idea emerged: What if we were to collaborate with national retailers like Target and Canadian Tire to produce student-designed products? Manufactured by Umbra and distributed by these retailers, the collaborations pay royalties to students, create social content for the retailers and Umbra, and raise consumer awareness regarding the design process. Consumers are now bombarded with hundreds of new products that aim to deliver on their product promise. But often, it’s a company’s higher purpose that can influence a consumer’s choice. A higher purpose unites people and improves company morale – if employees believe in your purpose, they will believe in your

business. Purpose attracts great talent and connects a business to its customers in a unique way. In an era where the customer’s expectations are so high, isn’t it now increasingly important for our companies to stand for something? To have purpose? Take TOMS, for example, which donates one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair sold. The success of this business relies on the practice, rather than the product. Likewise, fashion bag startup LeDaveed supports its own sustainability purpose by using environmentally friendly tanned leather, while also running a campaign to give a percentage of profits to WaterAid. It’s been a long time since I was focused solely on survival. As both the leader of Umbra and as an individual, I feel I have earned the right to search for a higher purpose. The purpose of Umbra has evolved and extended into my personal life. Design isn’t just something I think about in terms of Umbra anymore. It has become me; it is part of everything that I do. I recently joined the board of a group that wanted to develop a battery-assisted commuter bike. The higher purpose: to combat climate change by reducing carbon emissions. The e-bike provides the solution and, if enough people catch on, could help to reduce carbon emissions by reducing the number of cars on the road. This endeavor represents the kind of purpose we should all strive for: to change the world for the better, in whatever way we can. Creative people need projects that have a higher purpose. For designers, that means designing products and concepts laden with purpose. And for brands, that means standing for a higher purpose. So, next time you’re enjoying a moment of reflection in a quiet space, try to ask yourself: What is your higher purpose? //// Paul Rowan is cofounder of Umbra and CCO of paulrowan.ca.

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The early 21st century has taught us that we cannot always predict the future. How can an organization develop a competent, future-focused board of directors that is resilient, innovative, technically savvy, and agile enough to rapidly respond to sudden changes and embrace new opportunities? One path forward is equipping board directors to be more resilient and reflective, as well as to suspend judgment, to not jump to hasty decisions without sufficient dialogue, and to take into account legal, regulatory, and financial risks. In addition, being mindful of the implications of government regulations, community relations, and human resources requires thoughtful dialogue to ensure that ethical- and values-based leadership are always positioned as key anchors for operating a board. The successful boards of today and tomorrow have one powerful resource for guiding their dialogue: data. However, the sheer volume of data explosion drives our world and results in an exponential cognitive overload. The size of the digital universe will double every two years at least, with a 50-fold growth expected from 2010 to 2020. Human- and machinegenerated data are already experiencing a growth rate that is 10 times faster than that of traditional business data, while machine data is increasing at 50 times the growth rate. Everything around us is becoming smarter – technology is in everything. As humans, we are no longer as cognitively alert as we were just 10 years ago. On average, we are able to focus on something (without being distracted by a new incoming thought) for less than 10 seconds; just 10 years ago, our attention lasted for 20 seconds, on average. This decrease in human cognitive focus has been fueled by mobile connectivity. While we are plugged in 24/7, our productivity is being severely impacted by our cognitive dissonance. What this means is that we are constantly distracted. So, how can we help board members be more attentive during board meetings, and how can we help them focus on making decisions that are reflective, thoughtful, and values centric? This is not an easy question, as the role of the board is to provide business and strategic advice to management and to approve the company’s long-term strategy.

Practicing Mindfulness B Y D R. C I N D Y G O R D O N

Leading in the Age of Distraction Today, we are experiencing a tidal wave of rapid changes sweeping every industry. Most boards of directors are ill prepared to confront the current and future challenges posed by new technological innovations, such as AI, machine learning, cyber security, robots, digital convergence, IoT, robo-advisors, complex omni-channels, and more.

PHOTO: MARI LEZHAVA

A NEW WAY FORWARD FOR BOARD DIRECTORS

// MINDFULNESS PRACTICES COULD BE INTEGRATED WITH AI OR AUGMENTED REALITY TECHNOLOGIES. //

A New Board Skill: Mindfulness By building mindfulness skills, board directors can learn to make better, more reflective decisions. The simple ability to pause and ensure that all factors are explored from multiple viewpoints is rapidly becoming a survival skill required to manage the explosion of person– machine interfaces. Mindfulness is a translation of the Pali term sati, an important element of Buddhist teachings. This practice is used to develop self-knowledge and wisdom. Large population-based research studies have indicated that the practice of mindfulness is strongly correlated with greater wellbeing and health benefits. By practicing mindfulness as a leadership development skill, executives and board members can learn to look at the world from multiple perspectives: political, economic, environmental, sociological, technology, etc. In the boardroom, mindfulness is the capacity of a group of people to think collectively and deeply, with a sense of unified coherence and purpose. A skilled, mindful board weaves conversations around the different agenda topics to ensure the development of multiple reflection points. In this way, the members give value to the past and present while looking forward to the future. Board deliberations require thoughtful dialogue regarding not only the impact a decision will have on an enterprise, but also on how decisions can impact the industry, society, and the world at large in both the short and long term. Develop a mindful board goes far beyond personal mindfulness practices. The future mindful board director could go well beyond behavioral mindfulness – that is, mindfulness practices could be integrated with AI or augmented reality technologies.

Conclusion Moving forward, board directors will need to practice mindfulness in order to operate more effectively and efficiently in the Age of Distraction. As human and machine interfaces continue to blur, it will become increasingly important for business leaders to have a sense of ethical responsibility. Only in this way can we unlock a future in which we use sound judgment to guide our organizations forward. In the interim, we can develop increased harmony in our behavioral practices by applying mindfulness techniques to improve our cognitive decision making. Keeping an eye on the future is a major responsibility of board directors – especially during this important time of transition, during which AI, robotics, and sensor technologies will come to influence every aspect our lives. Is your board ready? //// Dr. Cindy Gordon is CEO and founder of SalesChoice Inc., an AI and cognitive sciences company. Dr. Gordon is also a futurist and the author of 14 published books.

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B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y AND SAM VENIS

What do we mean when we use the word “progress”? How do we track progress? What drives progress? What is it that actually progresses? We all know what the word means, but I challenge you to answer these questions to your own satisfaction, let alone anyone else’s. Our collective inability to do so demonstrates the problem lying at the core of the term “progress”: It means different things to everyone, even though we are all taught about it in much the same way. Most of us have been told the same basic story. In this narrative, progress is the advancement of humankind and human society from a primitive state to a sophisticated, civilized existence. We are also taught that we have advanced as a species

through technological innovations, which have helped us move incrementally from banging rocks together to checking Facebook while flying over the Pacific. Finally, we are taught that this technological advancement is what has driven human progress and that the divisions of the Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Industrial Age, and Information Age sufficiently capture the nature of our progress as a whole. However, this thinking all depends on the idea that we can trace our development as a species and the evolution of our societies and culture through the advancement of our technologies. This idea, which gained popularity in the 19th century, may be wrong. Only by understanding the inadequacy of this concept, and its recent history, can we begin to answer the many questions that exist around progress.

MATERIAL ECONOMICS

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Progress: A History Progress is a concept that we use to define ourselves and understand who we are. By looking to the past to see how far we have come, and looking to the future to see where we want to be, we feel that we can better understand ourselves. The present is just one point on a historical line of progress – it leads us bravely into an unknown future of bigger and better things. Progress, then, has become such a strong concept that we reverentially hold it as a core feature of our collective identity. We even like to think that progress is an inherently positive thing, and that any change that moves us to a brighter future is at least good – if not inevitable. But the notion of progress has not remained constant, and it has meant many different things in the past. Our current concept of progress was crafted in the same crucible that forged the Industrial Age – that is, it was informed by the philosophies and actions of a society moving from an agrarian lifestyle to industrialization at the breakneck speed of a steam locomotive. For the industrializing countries, technology represented power and money. Progress was understood as being intimately connected to the reach of a country’s navy and military – a reach that could be extended through the application of technology. This expansion was understood through the lens of “conquering nature,” subduing ignorance, and pacifying the savage, and this worldview is echoed in the archeological records, economic models, and even colonial wars of the time. Progress thus became inextricably tied to technology, a connection that persists today. This notion of progress has the potential to become a corrosive trope that actually damages our collective humanity; in reality, technological progress reveals only one small area of human endeavor. The idea of technological progress is something that we often use to explain away a number of changes to our environment and cultures, as well as to justify our ever-expanding economies and overuse of natural resources. Importantly, as the means of production became increasingly mechanized, our model

of the universe began to rely on the metaphor of the machine. We began to understand progress as being driven by the universal application of the scientific method to society, as well as by the mechanization of activities previously left to more informal devices. These changes corresponded to a few important intellectual developments. And it is these models of human behavior, science, and economics that contributed to the development of our current notion of progress. Here are just a few of the contributing factors that helped us build a technological view of progress.

SOCIAL DARWINISM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION CIVILIZATION

THE OBJECTIVE WORLD Before the Enlightenment, people believed that the world was ordered by divine will. The idea of an objective world that is real and available to all through scientific exploration developed as the figure of God became less of a focus in the search for truth. During the Renaissance, the development of humanism set the stage for humancentered study, where we looked at the world through our own eyes and became less interested in seeing it through God’s. As the rediscovered logic of the ancient Greeks took hold, thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, and eventually Kant, Bentham, Hume, Mill, and a host of others pioneered new ways of understanding the world and human activity. We learned to see the “natural” world as one that was free of human intervention and open to our exploration. Science became a humancentered activity that was focused on learning the secrets of the natural world through experimentation and observation. We no longer had to discern God’s will; instead, we aimed to understand the objective essence of things in order to learn about the world around us.

As our understanding of the “natural world” expanded and yielded discoveries in chemistry, physics, and geology, we began to look at the human world – including human behavior, human activity, politics, and desire – in the same way. Now the “real world” of human behavior was open to the same kind of scientific explorations. Because the Western world was increasingly interconnected with the indigenous peoples of a growing list of colonies, we needed an explanation for our differences. Civilization was the answer: a seemingly objective explanation of the differences in social organization, technological capacity, beliefs, and attitudes. The “civilized” person was someone who had more power, technology, and social cohesion. This belief was held despite the fact that none of these things were objective qualities.

Beginning roughly in the latter half of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution was arguably the result of our study of the objective natural world. We learned to harness and apply our new knowledge to the development of machines and compounds that allowed us to produce more food, fight disease, build higher buildings, travel faster, and grow our populations. Coupled with changes in our political and economic systems, the age of machines allowed us to transform our societies and populations in unprecedented ways. The most obvious products of these efforts were machines, which became a convenient metaphor for the changes as a whole. The Industrial Revolution became increasingly described as the product of those hulking, steaming iron monsters that produced goods and altered the landscape forever. Our new ability to scale our activities, make more things at a faster rate, and send those things farther away changed the scope of human activity. A global reach was now within our grasp.

In 1859, Charles Darwin, a naturalist, codified a set of ideas that many individuals were working on, most notably Alfred Russel Wallace. Darwin popularized the idea that the development of all life on earth had a clearly explainable mechanism for its development, with the implication being that all species currently living on the planet were related to older species and developed through a process of mutation and sexual selection. Evolution, the product of these drivers, subsequently became a very important metaphor during the latter half of the 19th century. Darwin’s theory explained many differences and similarities in all areas of human endeavor, and almost immediately, scholars and naturalists seized the idea that human society could be explained in the same way. Suddenly, the gap between the civilized person and the colonized savage could be described in terms of a linear evolution, with the savage on one end and the Westerner at the other. The idea of progress now had a clear set of mechanisms – and technological development was one way of explaining movement across the continuum. At the same time, archaeologists began finding early hominid species, the ancestors of modern apes and humans. The bones and stone tools they found put biological and technological evolution at the forefront of our study of human development. In this way, technology became the centerpiece of human development. It did not take long before we were looking to the future and measuring our development into the unknown in technological terms.

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From the middle of the 19th century into the 20th century, we began to seek new ways to explain the impact of our newfound global reach and technological advancement. Early economic thinkers like Karl Marx codified the ideas of progress that explained how the industrialized world had come into being. Marx especially articulated the economic development of the West through the lens of its material production, which he located at the center of political, economic, and social development. His historical view of evolutionary development explained how the exploitative nature of business and technology arose and subjugated vast populations of the globe. Marx’s version of economics explained the rise of much of the West’s civilization in terms of material production and technological advancement. Because his economic theories still ground much of our understanding of economics as a whole, his historical materialism became, and remains, the dominant explanation of social advancement.

The Advancement of Progress Combined, these concepts have made it easy for us to see technology as the driver of human progress. Because we still believe most of these ideas to some degree, we see progress as something that is technological. However, it is very important to remember these are just ideas – they are ways of looking at the world around us, but they are not the only ways. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and each can be applied correctly or incorrectly. Social Darwinism, for instance, has caused a great deal of hatred, racism, exploitation, and misery throughout history. If we just take these ideas as absolute truths and do not investigate them or seek alternatives, our notion of progress will not advance. The concept of technological progress is a very old idea. In a very real way, we still live with a 19th-century understanding of progress. Perhaps it is time we began to explore alternatives and find a better way to explain how we progress as people, societies, users, and humans. //// Dr. Paul Hartley is a former senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Sam Venis is a foresight analyst at Idea Couture.

An Interview With Dr. Angelica Lim About the Future of a More Social Robot

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BUILDING A BETTER BOT

BY SHANE SAUNDERSON

I had the opportunity to watch Dr. Angelica Lim speak at the FITC FutureWorld conference in Toronto this past summer. Maybe it was because of her positive enthusiasm about the future of robotics, or maybe it was due to her equally present and balanced concerns about robotics – either way, by hearing her presentation and later having the opportunity to interview her, I came to understand the motivations of a woman whose purpose in life is to help ensure the field of robotics is evolving in a way that helps humanity. After finishing her PhD specializing in AI and robotics, Dr. Lim went to work for SoftBank Robotics. She is currently building greater intelligence into their NAOqi platform. Her passion revolves around making robots more social; ultimately, she is trying to create technologies that interact with us in a way that is more human. So, as we opened the conference line with visions of Pepper and NAO dancing in my head, here is what I was able to learn about Dr. Lim and her work.

PHOTO: SOFTBANK ROBOTICS

BUILDING

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I love asking the big questions first: Where do you see the future of robotics going? AL Questions like that are often tricky because I don’t see myself as some sort of prophet who can tell the future, since so many technologies and advancements pop up out of nowhere. The AI winter lasted for what, 40, 50 years? And now we’re just starting to see change. That said, one question mark for me is in terms of humanoid robots. I’ve lived in North America and I’ve lived in Japan, and in Japan, these robots have really taken off. There is a real love for humanoid robots in Japanese culture. It will be interesting to see if North America will embrace humanoid robots in the same way. If these robots do take off in the North American consumer market, what will they be used for? One of the things that we’re seeing in Japan is that a huge number – at least 2000 – of our Pepper humanoid robots have been put into schools as educational tools. I think back to when I was growing up and we had Apple computers in school to help us learn math and programming. Maybe the next generation will have robots in school or discover them at that age, and then this technology will just be normal for them when they grow up. So, my question about the future is this: If right now is the time of “generation tablet,” will the next generation grow up with robots as a norm?

What kinds of opportunities will emerge for businesses as robots become more prolific? AL So far there’s been a lot of effort around designing robots that can pick up boxes, do repetitive physical tasks, and ease the burden on people. What we’re looking at next is having robots that are also doing simple repetitive tasks, but on a social level. For instance, a person working at the train station may spend much of their day telling people the location of the nearest bathroom or McDonald’s rather than doing what they were hired to do. So now, we’re looking for simple repetitive interactions that we can offload from our employees and onto a more social robot. One big advantage that robots bring to these social interactions is that they can speak many languages. In Japan, for example, when foreigners come into a bank, they may struggle to find someone who speaks fluent English. Having a universal, multilingual robot can help with the interaction no matter the language. This is a very customer-centered way of solving the problem. What this requires in terms of the ecosystem is for more people to become robot app developers or game developers for robots. I originally got into robotics when I was a student in Japan. I bought an NAO robot and started building apps for it using Python. There is an ecosystem to the robot, but it comes initially as an empty shell,

// If you look around now, you see so many people with their heads down in their phones. I question whether that is how we want to be interacting with technology in the future. //

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and you need to download apps into it – almost like a robot brain – for it to have these skills. Last year we talked about a Pepper robot with an Android-based operating system that connects with the Google Play Store. Developers that are already making apps for Android can simply make them on Pepper. The Android app then enables all kinds of actions and can help the robot learn to say something, move, ask a question, or play a game. SS

I recall a quote about the true potential of a technology emerging when it is simple enough for anyone to use. How close are we with robotics development? AL We have “app jams” all over the world with kids. We participated in Devoxx4Kids events in Europe and the US. We have kids as young as six years old programming robots. They just have to drag and drop boxes in our platform, Choregraphe, and then they suddenly have the robots doing stuff. When I first worked in Japan, I was working with people on sales teams that didn’t necessarily have a technical background. They were there because they knew what kind of things the robot should say or do, since they were in the stores and saw the challenges or needs firsthand. Now, we have comedians in Japan programming the robot. And that’s where you get this amazing revolution. As engineers, we can build functional, working stuff, but this is a social robot – how do we make it beautiful, engaging, and surprising? There are specialists in these areas, and they often come from the entertainment industry. SS

Why have you devoted your life to robotic development? AL The reason I’m interested in investing my time in this is because I like to ask myself what technology is going to look like 30 years into the future. How will humans adapt ourselves to technology, and how will technology adapt to us? If you look around now, you see so many people with their heads down in their phones. I question whether that is how we want to be interacting with technology in the future. I’m hopeful that robots will soon understand our full communication spectrums, because we want to have that Star Wars reality where we can just chat with a robot casually. It shouldn’t feel like it does now – “Ok, Google” or “Hey, Alexa” – such a one-way interaction. Don’t get me wrong, that technology is revolutionary, but it’s just the first step. I think that when we can converse with robots more naturally, we won’t get so lost in the technology. Generally, I’m interested in technologies that can help solve problems for humans. I consider the best technological advances to be those that

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free our time for better things. For example, look at the home, with its washing machines, dishwashers, and vacuum cleaners. These technologies have been quite fundamental in empowering women to have time to leave the home and take on a more diverse set of jobs. It’s actually quite amazing that those machines, or robots of the time, completely changed society and enabled people to do other things that they felt were worthwhile. So, I see robotics as today’s technology that can free us for time better spent doing what we want to do. For me, it’s about creating more time to enjoy our lives.

Feb 27 & 28 | New York

SS AL

What does the next year hold for you? Just a couple of months ago, we launched the Pepper Promoter application. Essentially, it’s intended to allow businesses to have Pepper promote their products. Let’s say you’re a bank, for example. If you have Pepper at your place of business, the robot is there and talking about financial advice or offerings. The Pepper Promoter application is very easy to use – you just load some pictures, type in what you want the robot to say, and pretty much anyone can program it to talk about your product. From there, you can also monitor how people interact with Pepper, observing things like whether they liked the product more than another, their emotional response, and their demographic information – like age, gender, etc. It’s a great insight tool for businesses. //// Shane Saunderson is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and former VP, IC/ things at Idea Couture.

Speakers Include:

cchalmers@theiegroup.com

+1 (415) 604 3777

theinnovationenterprise.com

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Bringing Life

Into Death

Opening the Conversations on What Makes a Good Death

PHOTO: HAILEY KEAN

B Y L I LY Z H A N G

The desire to give death meaning is universal. Death allows us to understand that our existence is finite, and this in turn grounds us in our experiences. But despite the advancements humankind has made in the fields of science and technology, death itself remains one of life’s unsolved mysteries. If death has a purpose, what is it? Is death a gateway into our spiritual existence, or an evolutionary requirement? Until recently, there was little conversation around what constitutes a “good” death versus a “bad” one. However, as medical science continues to push the boundaries of mortality, the pursuit of an ideal life has shifted from one of longevity to one filled with purpose and meaning. Just as the conversation has opened up around what makes for a good life, we must also begin to consider how to have a good death.

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Disease vs. Illness

Redefining a Life Well-Lived

Traditionally, death has been seen as a failure of the art of medicine. “Physicians are taught from the beginning to diagnose and treat, to diagnose and cure, to diagnose and make better, or at least control,” says Dr. Angela Genge, director of the ALS clinic at the Montreal Neurological Hospital. “The fact that you’re dealing with death means that somehow you can’t make the patient better, you can’t control. And some people are fundamentally afraid of that.” Medical professionals’ rejection of death and emphasis on diagnosing and curing has resulted in the limitation of biomedicine’s scope; in focusing solely on treating disease, the practice of medicine has neglected the holistic view of the patient. A 1993 study of physicians in training conducted at the Harvard Medical School by Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good found that the introduction to this mechanical culture of biomedicine occurs early in a student’s medical education. “They don’t want to hear the story of the person. They want to hear the edited version,” a study participant said. Students are quick to discover that disease is considered the object of medical attention, while other “fictional” qualities of medicine are often neglected. This can include consideration of a patient’s life experiences, their goals and values, and their support network. For those suffering from chronic or terminal illnesses, however, the prospect of living with an illness and dying with it are important considerations. Long after a disease has been deemed as treated or managed by medical professionals, the patient must continue living with the illness afterwards – and it is this time that poses the greatest challenges. Beyond its effects on the body, what other implications does the disease have on the patient’s experiences of living? To understand this, medical professionals must have a holistic understanding of each patient’s life; only in this way can they provide support for the patient’s experience of both living and dying with their disease.

Death cannot be encapsulated in a single moment. For most individuals, it is a process that takes place through a series of smaller “deaths.” How can healthcare providers support the patient during these gradual milestones – physical, spiritual, and otherwise – of death? How do you want to die? According to one article by Bethany Cairns and Mariam Ahmad for CBC, 90% of individuals would prefer to die at home. Research has also shown that when faced with life-changing diseases and chronic illnesses, many patients would rather choose death than face the consequences of living with intensive support systems in place to manage their illness. Palliative care and hospices represent one way of transforming the medicalization of death into something more private and personal. There comes a time in a patient’s battle with their illness when death is imminent and inevitable.

// If we are all able to come to terms with our own mortality, we can better understand life and find greater purpose. //

Also known as end-of-life or comfort care, palliative care helps patients explore where their values lie within the dying process. It is designed to help families and patients make their peace with death. The growth in palliative care and hospices in recent years has encouraged more conversations around what role medical institutions should play in preparing patients and their loved ones for death. With the growing acceptance of death and the focus on quality of life has come increased advocacy for assisted deaths and the creation of new ceremonial procedures, like living funerals. Some of these new death rituals have given families a way to navigate the complex and uncertain nature of death. Living funerals, for example, are redefining death by reframing the funeral event as a celebration of life. This tradition, which started in Japan, gives loved ones a time to honor and appreciate the living. It also gives the dying person an opportunity to speak openly about the inevitability and imminence of their death.

The Death Plan Death is as much a part of life as birth, yet it is often treated as the elephant in the room. Cultivating awareness and acceptance around death will prevent individuals from resorting to futile medical treatments in the face of death. As individuals, many of us will have the opportunity to plan the circumstances around our own deaths. To take advantage of this opportunity, we must understand that death is a process that, to some degree, we can control – and, as a result, find greater purpose in. //// Lily Zhang is an innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

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When it comes to productivity and motivation, they’ve got a frustratingly clear view: that when you pay for performance you get more for your buck. So, while concepts like “engagement” and “purpose” are heard in their boardroom, the investment and energy they attract pales in comparison to the worship of remuneration strategy. Because really, they just think everyone is looking out for number one. It’s time for a tougher pitch for meaningful work. The pay-for-performance practices that have come to dominate the corporate world are built on a foundation of standard economic theory. According to this set of beliefs, people act in their own interests, so they’ll work harder if there’s money on the table. The competition that’s fostered between employees scrapping for a limited bonus pot will serve to push the business forward. And those at the bottom can be left behind. But just as behavioral economics has shown standard theory to be a poor predictor of human behavior, there’s little connection between pay-for-performance practices and the volumes of academic research on motivation and goal setting. One of our most pernicious systems, where employees are ranked against each other on a fixed distribution curve, is an almost perfect asymmetry of the evidence. It’s like we studied human behavior and flipped the findings on their heads in multiple ways: / By labeling over half our employees’ as average or below average by design;

BY JAMES ELFER

/ By enforcing a process that removes any sense of independence and control.

This article originally appeared in the LSE Business Review.

We’ve all met the eye-rollers. The leaders who say “business is business” and “people work to get paid.” The ones who leave “pastoral care” to the HR team down the hallway because there’s work to be done and money to be made.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

PERFORMANCE NEEDS PURPOSE

/ By driving a competitive wedge between teams and fostering mistrust between people and their managers; and

In retrospect, perhaps we shouldn’t have needed academia to tell us this would end badly. Most will relate to a question that Dan Ariely, Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, says people will soon begin to ask themselves: “Really? That’s it? That’s the reason I’m here?”

Self-Determination Theory and Purposeful Work

Helping People “Self-Determine” Their Performance

Self-determination theory is a macro theory of human motivation. It studies how our behavior and performance changes according to what drives us, namely:

Let’s work from relatedness, competence, and autonomy. We need to feel connected to one another, so how about a shared purpose that’s powerful enough to bring people together? It needs to be more than annual profits, rising share prices, and innovation for innovation’s sake, but it can’t leave commercial growth by the wayside. It needs to find the value we bring to the world and put it at the core of our business strategy. If you want a blueprint for success, look to Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan. It’s a long-term model that connects employees, shareholders, and customers under a shared vision of social impact and growth. An integrated “corporate purpose” is a great starting point, but it’s not likely to improve employee performance on its own. We need to take that abstract vision and democratize it by helping people understand the important part they play; giving them time and space to interpret it personally; and encouraging them to take ownership of the impact they make. That’s easier said than done, but it’s an approach based on firm empirical ground. It deserves attention, resources, and exploration. In the modern economy, we can’t simply pay people to perform. Those who cling to this view are not “rational” or “hard” or “commercial” – they are wrong. The future of performance needs us making connections, not just writing checks. Performance needs purpose. ////

/ Inside-out motivations: pleasure, values, or the satisfaction of psychological needs / Outside-in motivations: the punishments or rewards of an outside entity Inside-out motivations hold great promise for increases in productivity and wellbeing. But they require us to feel good about the contribution we’re making (competence), have control over our work (autonomy), and feel positively connected to our peers (relatedness). When we’re in this state, we’re not acting for reward or avoiding outside disapproval – we’re acting for ourselves. It’s a win-win because we bring heightened levels of excitement and confidence, better task performance, and improved creativity to our work. We’re also happier as a result; the pillars connect directly to a critical component of our wellbeing academics have called “eudemonic” – we reach for personal meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, the two forms of motivation don’t always play nicely. Pay-for-performance practices, representing outside-in motivations, don’t just fail to promote our three pillars – they bully them away with a brash reminder that “we’re doing it for the money.” Purposeful work isn’t about avoiding a good and fair basic salary, mind; it’s just moving away from the illusion that performance will differ based on the variability of the reward. For knowledge workers particularly, there’s scant evidence that’s the case.

James Elfer is the founder and behavioral insights director at people and communications consultancy, MoreThanNow.

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CONNECTING TO AN IMAGE OF THE FUTURE

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B Y D R. A N D Y H I N E S

Let’s define purpose as “the reason for which we exist.” As humans, we have the ability to choose our purpose. In my 2011 book Consumershift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape, I outlined a few common purposes people have based on the way they orient their values, this included:

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/ Service to God or others. The traditional approach cites service to God or a higher power as a purpose. Religions have long advocated this as the proper purpose for an individual to have. / Happiness (also known as wellbeing). The modern view of purpose is captured in the US Declaration of Independence, which cites the pursuit of happiness as an “unalienable right.”

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/ Creative expression. In this postmodern approach, individuals are driven by their desire to create, express, and share with others. / Making a difference. Individuals often cite the desire to “make the world a better place” as one of their primary motivators.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

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While these purposes are all noble and good, most of them are too vague to be really helpful (with the exception of service to God or others facilitated through organized religions). These ambiguous purposes still leave many broad questions open: What is happiness? What does a world of creatively expressive people look like? What is the “better place?” With this in mind, it becomes clear that we need more than purpose: We need purpose connected to vision. In other words, we need an image of a preferred future.

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I initially became interested in the future after reading Fred Polak’s 1973 classic, The Image of the Future. It is a grand, sweeping exploration of the role played by people’s image of the future in the great and not-sogreat Western civilizations of the past. While the great civilizations were guided by a positive, compelling image of the future, the not-so-great ones lacked such an image. Polak was concerned about society’s lack of a future image in the 1970s – and I daresay that the situation has not improved much in 2017. So, the problem is not that we lack purpose, but that our purpose lacks a positive and compelling future vision. In today’s capitalist world, the pursuit of happiness is the dominant purpose. This is best illustrated by the US. In this capitalist context, there are two clear keys to happiness: economic growth and individual wealth. Thus, we currently have a system organized around markets and competition. There are more losers than winners in this economic game, and even those who win often come up short of achieving their goal of happiness; there is some fairly persuasive data to indicate that once we achieve a fairly basic level of economic security, more money does not equal more happiness. Let’s give capitalism and the pursuit of happiness via economic growth its due and declare victory. Capitalism has achieved its purpose of growing the economy. It has transformed the world from one characterized by the subsistence and scarcity of the agricultural era to one of incredible abundance. This transition is truly astounding – centuries of essentially no economic growth, and then boom, the Industrial Revolution comes along and economic growth takes off. Capitalism has enabled truly monumental advances across all aspects of life, from improved health and increased life expectancy, to unimaginable advances in mobility, dramatic increases in technological capability, and so on.

However, now the problem is this: The context of the world has changed, and capitalism no longer serves a useful purpose. This mismatch is becoming more and more evident. There are three major existential challenges that have accompanied the growth of capitalism:

/ Our increasing environmental footprint is threatening to overload Earth’s ecosystem in a variety of ways, with the major threat being climate change. / With our exponential technological progress has come the possibility of weapons of mass destruction, as well as other threats, including a potential AI takeover, gray goo (i.e. self-replicating robots causing the end of the world), and new biotech dangers. / Growing inequality is threatening the political and social order, creating tensions ranging from class conflict to global terror.

I’m not using the term “existential challenge” lightly – these are very big problems. But because we’re not sure yet what’s going on, we’re not really mobilizing; instead, we are trying to ignore the problems or hoping they will go away. The future is becoming something to be dreaded, feared, or – at the very least – avoided. So, we approach purpose while firmly oriented in the present, but with no clear vision of where we want to go in the future. This is where we futurists, designers, and visionaries need to come in. We need to develop a compelling image and vision of what life after capitalism could look like in order to guide our various purposes, be they spiritual, economic, creative, or social in nature. Over the last few years, I’ve uncovered many ideas about new economic approaches during my research for a new book on life after capitalism (I have about 40 concepts at last count). Yet I’ve found that these new ideas suffer from a lack of future vision. Once I dug deeper into them, I found that few really got at purpose or vision; instead, they mostly suggested tweaks to existing approaches. However, I did find three ideas worthy of further exploration: / Sustainability and moral (purpose). Many of the 40 concepts focused on sustainability and suggested a vision of what a sustainable future could look like. While the need to protect the environment was typically the key driver, for some concepts, a systemic view was taken which recognized the inter-related economic, political, social, and technological aspects of sustainability. The strong moral thread running through many of these concepts indicates a shared sense of purpose. Some concepts seek to use the capitalist system to achieve sustainable ends. While this is a sensible transition strategy, it’s the vision guiding this purpose that we really need. What does a sustainable world really look like? / Abundance and the singularity. This is the high-tech future. On the one hand, proponents suggest tremendous capabilities and wonders, which are described in detail by many scholars. See, for example, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, by Diamandis and Kotler. On the other hand, the transformative change that will be brought on by the singularity is such that we can’t know what’s on “the other side” of it. / The “non-worker’s paradise.” Lately, I’ve been struck by a growing volume of works written by a group that could be identified as the “new” or “reformed” left. They’ve been looking at what went wrong the first time around with Marxism and are searching for a more compelling vision and strategy. Each of these three potential visions demonstrates ways of working toward an image of the future, although there is much work to be done. These perspectives suggest targets for the purposes of recrafting happiness, enabling creative expression, making a difference, or making the world a better place. To sum up: The world of homo economicus is dying; the pursuit of happiness via economic growth and individual wealth is fading. But demonizing capitalism isn’t going to help; instead, we need to incorporate the interests of the established capitalist order into our future plans. Let’s acknowledge that capitalism did its job of moving us from scarcity to abundance, even if it did create a new set of existential challenges to deal with. Any vision we create for the future will have to deal with inequality, mind-blowingly powerful technologies, and an ecosystem under duress. That sure does present us with a purpose: We are literally trying to save life on earth. To do that, we need a compelling vision of the future to connect that purpose to. Let’s get to work! //// Dr. Andy Hines is program coordinator and assistant professor at the University of Houston’s graduate program in foresight.

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Face-to-Face Contact THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE ROOM IN A FLAT WORLD

For the past 17 years, I have worked remotely at companies leveraging author Thomas Friedman’s “flat world” principles. With this in mind, it may be surprising that I’m about to extol the virtues of face-to-face collaboration. Many elements of most jobs can be done anywhere. If you write code to a spec, you can do it in the office, in your bedroom, in the closest Starbucks, or even in the bath – nobody really cares. As long as your work is good and delivered on time, anything goes. If you handle customer service calls, you can do it on the massive floor of a call center or at your kitchen table in Kansas City, as long as your turnaround times and customer satisfaction ratings are up to snuff. If, like me, your job mainly consists of the three Rs – reading, ‘riting, and ruminatin’ – then a clean, well-lit place is about all you need. Except for, that is, when you need the heat, energy, frustration, excitement, and drama of intellectual hand-to-hand combat to find, build, and win the future of your work. In that case, there is no substitute for being in the room. Different communication tools – including the phone, Skype, email, Slack, video conferences, Jabber, FaceTime, and Google Hangouts, among others – serve their purposes well. But when you want a group of people to come together to really talk, focus, and energize each other; to really be creative and innovative; and to really sell ideas to each other and dig deep, then the benefits of being in the same physical space are difficult to beat. Though collaboration tools are continuously being improved, they are still not ideal for intensive creative work. We use many non-verbal cues to communicate during face-to-face conversations, but these become difficult to pick up on and interpret during digital interactions. Laptop cameras that point up from a 75-degree angle provide an unusual visual for commun-

PHOTO: JOSHUA NESS

BY BEN PRING

icating – you’d never peer down at somebody when you were in a meeting room with them, nor would you be looking up their nose. This awkward way of conversing can easily break your concentration as you wonder whether the person you’re talking to realizes that they’re being presented in a rather unflattering way. On top of that, without good network connectivity and a strong wifi signal, you may experience latency issues that can make a video-based conversation feel more reminiscent of a scene from 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey than a modern-day business meeting. This is particularly true when dealing with colleagues in the developing world. While emerging technologies, such as VR, may improve the situation in time, these are still far from widespread adoption. Likewise, presenting yourself through your Bitmoji may catch on eventually – but probably not this side of 2025. Being in the room together allows – and forces – people to concentrate, avoid the distractions of their cellphones, respect the other people in the room, give their full attention to the creative process, be present, be engaged, and contribute. This type of attention is compromised when one appears only as an online presence. Though lots of less-creative collaborative work can be done perfectly well with remote workers, more elaborate projects involving two or more people are still best done while sitting across a table from one another. Many organizations and companies are recognizing these trends and reacting to them. IBM, one of the early pioneers of a distributed service model, has now reversed course and mandated that all of its US employees work out of 10 major hub cities. General Electric has relocated to Boston, MA, from suburban Connecticut, in order to refresh its employee pool with a younger cadre of workers who want to be downtown and to have in-person interactions with their coworkers. Cornell University has established a tech campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City (away from its main campus in rural upstate New York) in order to tap into concentrated groupings of next-generation talent. In-person interaction is being recognized again as a differentiator in the war for talent – talent being the most important ingredient in any organization’s future-of-work recipe. The technology that binds the global village has never been as advanced or sophisticated as it is now; 460 billion devices connected to the internet means that work is happening 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year around the globe. The world is truly more flat than ever – ironically, this flatness means that “the room” matters more than ever, too. A new hybrid model is emerging in which the benefits of remote work and the catalytic heat generated by “the room” are melded. Now, if we only we could use astral projection or teleportation to get ourselves from home to office… then, we might really have something! //// Ben Pring is VP and managing director of Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work.

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Millennial CEOs in the Making

PREPARING TODAY’S MILLENNIAL LEADERS TO BECOME TOMORROW’S GREAT CEOS

In the not-too-distant future, we will see millennials joining the ranks of C-suites, becoming CEOs of large enterprises, and taking their place as the pre-eminent leaders of tomorrow. Today, millennials (roughly considered to be those between 18 and 34 years of age) are 76 million strong – the largest living generation in the US, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those who have experience managing highperforming millennials appreciate how different they are from previous generations. However, corporate America is still struggling to appreciate the value that millennials bring – and how to get the best from them as they progress into leadership roles. Today, there are already many millennial CEOs in the fashion and technology industries. In more traditional business domains, like the financial or advertising sectors, they are typically three levels below C-suite. Within the next five years, most of them will be only one or two levels from C-suite. When nurturing tomorrow’s millennial CEOs, there are a number of questions that we should be asking, including: What inner values guide millennials’ motivations and choices? Gen X-ers are largely considered pragmatists who don’t easily buy into the things they are told. Boomers are seen as idealists who single-mindedly

03 MILLENNIAL LEADERS ON VALUES

Millennial leaders have little organizational loyalty. Many grew up jumping from startup to startup, gig to gig, as a means to enhance their own careers and experiences. They will probably place less emphasis on loyalty when they hire people, and more emphasis on skills. Their expectations surrounding employee loyalty are more likely to relate to employees achieving a certain milestone, rather than focusing on workers becoming lifers. It is not that loyalty doesn’t exist for these younger leaders – their loyalty to an organization is just highly influenced by their degree of engagement with their leadership role. Millennial leaders are highly impatient; they are hungry for growth in their current jobs (whether they are ready or not) and expect to regularly move up the ladder. If this doesn’t happen, retention will falter. Loyalty is linked to career progress – not stability. This is in contrast to this generation’s loyalty to brands, which they will stick with through thick and thin – as long as the brand aligns with their aspirations and purpose.

Millennial leaders certainly have different values than their older counterparts and current CEOs, but these differences aren’t as dramatic as you might think. All leaders place the highest value on strong ideas, execution capabilities, and critical thinking and problem solving. I think there will be more emphasis on creativity and the value of customer experience, along with more diversity in the workplace.

02 MILLENNIAL CEOS ON LEADERSHIP believe that what they were taught in business school should simply work. Millennials are somewhere between the two. What specific and unique qualities should we be looking for in the next generation of CEOs? Should we be using the same criteria as we do for current leaders? Today, we often look for a willingness to take calculated risks and to take a stance; a bias toward action, not just talk; and the ability to efficiently pick good people and mobilize them. While these desired attributes might not change in the future, we can expect millennial CEOs to be more comfortable when it comes to dealing with ambiguities and taking risks. They are generally more adept at operating under extreme uncertainties. Will these future millennial CEOs be more like the current crop – think Mark Zuckerberg – or will their leadership styles resemble those of an older generation of leaders, such as Howard Schultz or Elon Musk? If they are anti-establishment in nature and take pride in re-architecting current systems, what will they dismantle from the ecosystem that was built and handed over to them? Although previous generations spent a lot of time and money supporting and updating legacy systems, millennials will favor starting anew. I am not sure that there are answers to the above questions, but here are a few observations from my experience with millennials.

Millennials will lead in fundamentally different ways. They highly value on-the-job development opportunities, rather than formal training, as the most effective way to learn. Every task or project should have built-in development opportunities and feedback loops to ensure progress is explicit. These young leaders need coaches that are not senior by experience, but by an exceptional ability to help transform others. Millennial leaders value how important it is to create meaningful learning journeys in order to attract and retain high performers, and they will put a strong emphasis on investing and developing a blended new array of learning technologies and pedagogical means. They favor transparency and have the ability to engage others with a sense of purpose.

PHOTO: WILLIAM STITT

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

01 MILLENNIAL LEADERS ON LOYALTY

// WHAT INNER VALUES GUIDE MILLENNIALS’ MOTIVATIONS AND CHOICES? //

04 MILLENNIAL LEADERS ON THE WORKPLACE Millennial leaders prefer workplaces that are open and fun – many grew up in such environments. They favor low-hierarchy organizational structures, while also demanding visibility of career progress and pathways (which, in principle, sounds contradictory). They expect good coffee; free snacks and Ping-Pong tables are the norm. They prefer more flexibility and the ability to move from a project room to community workspaces and hot desks. Millennials highly value flexible policies for vacation and options for working remotely. And yet, as much as they are comfortable with virtual meetings, they still place a lot of value on face-to-face interactions with mentors so that they can get frequent feedback.

– While it’s incredibly hard to predict what will happen two decades from now, I am generally positive that millennials can make better CEOs than their older counterparts. They are highly engaged and purposedriven digital natives. They strive for a good balance between corporate responsibility, sustainability, and profitability. They are also incredibly ambitious and aspirational, with most of them growing up inspired by the likes of Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Musk. One thing is for sure: The workplace will be a lot more casual, with far more value-add services for employees in the form of novelty amenities. It won’t quite be about work-life balance, but rather work-life seamless integration. For millennial leaders, there will be few boundaries between work and life. //// Idris Mootee is global CEO of Idea Couture.

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Passionate Science Followed by Passionate Selling For the scientists working to discover and develop pharmaceuticals, a sense of purpose is palpable. These are the people working to translate basic science – the work that goes on to inform applied innovations – into tangible drugs, devices, and diagnostic tools. Clinical scientists achieve the same sense of euphoria when they successfully prove biochemical concepts in human testing, and then again when they establish that a drug’s effectiveness is greater than its side effects – meaning that it has therapeutic indications. This amazing translational science is made possible in the pharmaceutical industry due in large part to effective marketing and sales tactics, which result in profits that can then be reinvested into research. Though different stakeholders may have different motives, everyone involved in drug development ultimately has the same goal. This is not to say that passionate scientists do not understand the need for a profitable business – they most certainly do. Likewise, those business leaders who are directly accountable to shareholders have an interest in developing solutions that address unmet medical needs and ultimately help patients. However, given the extremely low amount of drugs that make it through to approval (according to Reuters, about 1 in 10 make it from Phase I to approval), pharmaceutical companies must be cautious when it comes to the research they wish to fund and advance. There is a polarity regarding purpose that underlies the desire pharmaceutical companies have for scientific breakthroughs (i.e. primarily the passion of scientists) and commercial blockbusters (i.e. primarily the passion of marketing and sales executives). This, however, is not a bad thing.

The Value in Heterogeneity of Purpose

The Strength in Heterogeneity of Purpose OBSERVATIONS FROM RESEARCH-BASED PHARMA

B Y D R. T E D W I T E K

I am fortunate to feel passionate about each aspect of my professional life, which has helped me understand how having a sense of purpose is key to enjoying and finding fulfillment in the long days, immense challenges, and difficult roadblocks I must navigate to be successful in my career. In my vocation of drug development and commercialization, the commerce of health takes center stage. While among the most challenging professions, developing pharmaceuticals is also one of the most rewarding. Over the course of my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work toward admirable parallel goals: discovering and developing new medications that help humans in a way that few other discoveries do, and contributing to the operation of a successful business.

While some might assume that these divergent purposes cause conflict within an organization, in reality, they are not so different. Janssen’s global head of R&D, Dr. Mathai Mammen, believes that such divergence contributes to a rich texture of various human viewpoints. “This heterogeneity of purpose of science and business in our sector adds a richness to a discussion that might not otherwise [take] place if everyone’s purpose [were] uniform,” notes Mammen. For example, consider the development of drugs used to dilate the obstructed airways of patients with asthma or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Over the past several decades, scientists have improved these medications; while patients previously had to take them several times a day, scientists have altered the chemical structure of the drugs so that they now bind to receptors for a prolonged period of time, meaning patients need only take a single dose per day. While these scientific advances have improved the lives of many patients, they have also resulted in

increased sales and profits for the industry. However, if a scientist wanted to improve these drugs from once-a-day therapy to every-other-day therapy, it is unlikely that a pharmaceutical company would allocate funds to such a project. This is because the advance would provide little value to the patient, and it also would not benefit the healthcare system. While commercial decisions may sometimes override the application of good science, in this case, it would be in every stakeholder’s interest to focus their efforts elsewhere. When might science and patient benefits overtake a narrowly focused view of simple profitability? What if price elasticity curves were discussed not in terms of maximal profits, but in terms of maximal patient benefit? Consider, for example, the recent game-changing advances in hepatitis C virus treatments. After decades of little to no progress, pharmaceutical scientists developed therapies with phenomenal attributes – the drugs are now easy to administer, require a relatively brief regimen of therapy, and have minimal side effects. The cost of these treatments is very high at $1000 USD per tablet; however, the new medicines have “a cure rate of over 95%,” as reported by the World Health Organization in 2016.

Heterogeneity Leads to Healthy Debates This situation, in which science and business seem at odds with each other, prompts exactly the kind of healthy debate that can be brought about by divergent purposes. For example, although the medication is expensive, it could be argued that providing the medication to as many patients as possible is in the economic interest of the government, as its use would substantially reduce the burden of disease of the hepatitis C virus (e.g. it would reduce the number of liver transplants required). Still, the budgetary impact of these drugs on providers would require additional resources and innovative approaches to implementing this care. Scientists will continue to discover and develop drugs that help humans; as long as they do, debates surrounding the commercial implications of marketing these drugs will lead to better care. //// Dr. Ted Witek is a professor and senior fellow at the Institute of Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (IHPME) at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto and Chief Scientific Officer at Innoviva in San Francisco. He is an advisor to the Design for Health program at OCAD University.

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE FOOD INDUSTRY

BY SCOTT FRIEDMANN

I learned two key things about food as an eight-year-old boy: It could be fun, and it was serious business. My father would come home from his “food factory” like a real-life Willy Wonka, laden with crazy products for which my brothers and I were the test subjects. We ate chocolate-stuffed chicken (delicious ooze), chicken pop tarts (a tad too dry and fruity), shredded green chicken (that is, chicken made to look like salad – quite like eating rubber spinach), and chicken grilled cheese (in which the chicken replaced the bread – likely the greasiest and most indulgent idea ever). My father believed in the food industry and lived to add fun to food, especially for children. He didn’t know about the damaging effects of processed food; he simply wanted to see me and my brothers laugh and smile at the foods he created, and he hoped that children from other families would too. He believed in Big Food for little people. And to me, my father was the face of the food industry. It is an industry that I have often thought of as the bedrock of human civilization. The pursuit of sustenance is one of evolution’s primary driving forces. Societies were once built around people’s need to live in places that would provide enough food to survive and thrive. However, with the advent of agriculture, everything changed. Today, the majority of the human population – 54%, according to the UN – live in urban areas, where they are entirely removed from the mechanics of food production. Now, 12,000 years after the First Agricultural Revolution, the food industry is a societal behemoth. It pumps out copious amounts of nutritionally deficient foods to the developed world, leaving little, if nothing, for those in the developing world and turning the planet into a wheezing, fatigued mess. After decades of booming business, this imbalance of important priorities – like health, distribution, and environmental impact – is just now being addressed.

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The Grand Aspirations of Big Food

The Elephant in the Room: Excess

What Big Food Can Still Do For Us

From its earliest days, Big Food has always had a grand mission: feeding the entire world. However, in the process of increasing farming yields and building multinational businesses, the industry overlooked the negative impact it was having on the lives of communities and individuals. Still, for my family and many others like it, Big Food was a miraculous provider. It helped us realize dreams that would have felt like pure fantasy prior to the Second World War, particularly in Europe. In 1945, my grandparents found themselves in a displaced person’s camp in Bamberg, Germany. Having run a grocery store in Budapest prior to the war, my family understood what it meant to be nourished and to provide nourishment. For them, food fed the soul as well as the body: Eating was an event. Meals were family occasions where people came together to experience food that tasted great and had been prepared with care. Food had more value then than it does now, in part because it was a much scarcer resource in the pre-Big Food era. When the first Friedmanns crossed the Atlantic and began life in Montreal, Quebec in 1954, the resources that governments and businesses had previously invested in their chemical arsenal found their way into agriculture. The 1950s saw chemical fertilizers and pesticides saturate farms. It was the first time that food production was properly scaled for mass consumption; it was the Space Age of food. Food was affordable and could be prepared quickly, causing the experience of family meals to shift. It was also during the 1950s that Big Food was joined in many households by another new family member: the television. Over the next 50 years, the two became nearly inseparable in many family dynamics, as food was shoveled down by people joined in their focus on a singular point. It’s easy to look back on the damage caused by high-calorie, sugary, over-processed, and packaged foods, as well as the removal of the ritual of mealtimes, as irresponsible, short-sighted decisions; however, for my family and many others, this was the first time that three affordable meals could be guaranteed every single day. By the time I was born in 1972, Big Food had provided for my family in ways they had never before dreamed of. My grandfather and father had been running their own food business for seven years and were part of the movement that made food a global industry. Seemingly overnight, international flavors were no longer reserved for high-end restaurants. Palates diversified, and the world became a little bit smaller. This meant that I grew up in a house where food was diverse and plentiful. The sort of hunger that my grandparents had experienced was completely alien to me.

Over the next two decades, my father didn’t question his relationship with food. He thought of himself as a man who knew food. He had dedicated his life to it, and in 1998 he invented Dino Buddies: breaded chicken pieces that resemble long-dead reptiles. Food for my father was fun – he made it quirky. He saw no downside to Big Food. It had given him the means to feed his family and had turned him into a successful businessman. The industry had given our family so much that we all overlooked the elephant in the room. To be perfectly frank, we weren’t overlooking the elephant in the room – we were overlooking four of them. I mean no disrespect to my father, grandfather, or two uncles, but by the mid-2000s – a time when Super Size Me was asking groundbreaking questions about the fast food industry – they collectively weighed about 2,000 pounds. My father had become the physical embodiment of Big Food. His profits and waistline had expanded at the same rate, and he was on the precipice of catastrophe. It was a blood infection that finally woke us all up. He had been blinded by the optimism Big Food has instilled in people. Lying in the hospital on life support, my father had a realization: Big Food had fed him, but food can and should do more than that. Food should nourish us, not destroy our health. It should bring people together, and even in times of plenty, it should be treated with the same intentional gravitas as it is by people who don’t have enough of it. Fortunately, my father recovered from his illness, and with this newfound purpose at heart, he sold his first business and started Tolerant, a company that makes legume-based pasta. In this way, he contributed one small piece to the multi-billion-dollar organic food revolution.

Technological advancements, together with an emergence of lifestyle-based diseases, have reopened the discussion around the sustenance provided by the food industry. How can Big Food feed an ever-expanding population without destroying the planet or slowly drip-feeding foods full of excess fat, protein, simple sugars, and difficult-to-spell chemical additives? Over the next decade, the food industry will be forced to take up the task of providing nourishment, not just calories. Finally, a cultural awakening is occurring surrounding the damaging effects of fast food on health – both human health and the health of the planet. This awakening is powering new ideas. By considering multiple possibilities, we can ensure that we are anticipating the changes to come and preparing for the future of food design. The future isn’t certain, but by understanding human needs and technological advances, we can begin to paint a picture of possible food futures, such as these:

/ Skyline Farming Skyline farms would shatter the cultural construct of farming as a pastoral pastime. The cultivation of farms within cities on a global scale would give consumers the complete farm-to-table transparency they desire. Additionally, the utilization of urban space for plants would result in cleaner city air, and it would also reduce the need to fell more forests in the name of farming. With the use of skyline farming, the cities of the future could be self-sufficient, as opposed to simply being a drain on rural and natural resources.

PHOTO: FOODISM360

// OVER THE NEXT DECADE, THE FOOD INDUSTRY WILL BE FORCED TO TAKE UP THE TASK OF PROVIDING NOURISHMENT, NOT JUST CALORIES. //

/ Gut Harmony The proliferation of increasingly sophisticated ingestible technologies could signal an important change. Such devices could soon be used to monitor a user’s gut condition in real time and to provide that user with information about what they are lacking nutritionally. These devices would help consumers understand not only what they’re craving, but also what they need to consume (or eliminate) to help their bodies and minds operate to their fullest potential.

/ Drone Foragers Drone foragers would harvest wild, undomesticated foods. These drones, designed based on the belief that true nourishment can only come from natural sources, would be equipped with olfactory and visual sensors to enable them to selectively pick food. The nourishment people would gain from these sources would be about more than diversifying their palates – rather, the food gathered in this way would have a story, be laced with a sense of adventure, and intensify consumers’ connections with the natural world.

It is time to put the era of Big Food behind us and to begin designing instead for Big Experiences. We can design more deliberate food experiences that engage our senses and give us a visceral sense of delight, which we can then savor and share with others. For me, there is no better example of this than the labor of love that is baking a loaf of sourdough bread. Ideally, you begin this process by grinding flour from grain that has been sourced from a local farmer. This sensual act of labor continues with the kneading and shaping of the dough; the pure pleasure of the warm, sweet smell as the bread is removed from the oven; the primal enjoyment of tearing into the bread; the delicious crunch of the crust and buttery softness when you bite into it; and the joy that comes from watching others consume it. No matter what technology infuses the food industry, eating is, at its heart, a physical experience that recalls the needs and desires of our ape ancestors. We become invested in what we are eating, and in this investment, we find both physical and emotional nourishment. And that’s what the food industry should be: an enabler of beautiful food experiences. Using insight, foresight, and strategy, we need to ask ourselves one firm question: How can we balance the scales of a historically damaging industry so that all people are healthy, nourished, and able to eat with purpose? //// Scott Friedmann is chief innovation officer, EVP at Idea Couture.

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Herbs and Seeds Inspired Neighbourhood Guide to Tokyo The Gate Hotel Kaminarimon Sé Collections Lisbon’s Old and New ALWAYS x ALWAYS Towel Pepper B. Pillows The Edgy Veg Bragi Headphones Brutal Food in London Caesarstone Clocks

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BY ESTHER ROGERS AND SHANE SAUNDERSON

Japan has been at the top of travelers’ lists for a while now, and Tokyo remains one of the most astounding and complex cities in the world. From its extraordinary culinary scene and trippy technology, to beautiful temples and serene parks, it’s truly a city of extremes. Here, we explore some of the most fascinating neighborhoods Tokyo has to offer.

Asakusa

Harajuku

Akihabara

Shinjuku

Shibuya

Shimokitazawa

This lovely district in Tokyo features a unique blend of history, retail, and modern intrigue. Traditionally an entertainment district, Asakusa’s main feature is the Sensō-ji Buddhist temple where one can take in traditional Japanese culture near the heart of the city. Flanked by a huge marketplace, Asakusa also features a variety of unique specialty shops, a diverse spectrum of Japanese restaurants, and charming parks that offer serene views of the Sumida River.

This district is best known as a center for Japanese youth culture, where you can shop in independent boutiques and sip overpriced coffees in hipster cafes – as long as you leave the main tourist street of Takeshita. A hub of Japanese fashion, you can wander up and down Cat Street, catching the latest cutting-edge outfits of Tokyo’s youth. Once you’re exhausted from wading through shoulder-to-shoulder crowds, you can disappear into Yoyogi Park for a bit of nature and calm.

A nerd’s haven, Akihabara is home to a massive concentration of electronics stores, anime and manga, toy shops, gaming arcades, and more. Wandering the streets of this eclectic neighborhood, you can just as easily duck into one of Japan’s famous (or creepy) maid cafes as you can pick up an original edition of Mother on the Famicom, or hug a guy in a full-sized Pikachu costume. Just be prepared to climb a lot of stairs – most of the shops are vertical, easily going eight or nine stories up.

Home of the world’s largest rail station, Shinjuku seems to breathe people in and out of the area, leaving a veritable throng to move through at all hours of the day and night. To the east of the station is Kabukichō – one of Tokyo’s better known red-light districts – where you can take in the ultimate of Japanese low-culture by going to the psychedelic Robot Restaurant (just don’t order the food). A touch farther east stands Golden Gai, a tiny area of shanty-style bars in tiny little two-story buildings, tightly concentrated into a four-block square. You can easily lose track of time in Shinjuku and find the sun rising over the buildings as you emerge from a Sake-fueled night.

If for no other reason, get off at Shibuya sometime during the day or early evening and watch the famous pedestrian crossing just outside the station. While you’re there, feel free to wander around the modern shopping district, catch a quick bite in an izakaya under the train tracks, or see the south end of Yoyogi Park and the National Yoyogi Stadium or Meiji Shrine.

Known globally as one of the coolest neighborhoods in the world, Shimokitazawa is alive with countless independent clothing stores, cafes, bars, and music venues. An amazing district simply to wander, snack, and window-shop, it’s the perfect place to spend an afternoon while uncovering some of Tokyo’s hidden gems behind secret doors and in the corners of shops.

PHOTOS: ESTHER ROGERS & SHANE SAUNDERSON

From Robots to Temples: A Neighborhood Guide to Tokyo

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Stay in Style in Tokyo: The Gate Hotel Kaminarimon BY ESTHER ROGERS

Located in the Asakusa area of Tokyo, the Gate Hotel Kaminarimon is perfect if you’re looking for a little reprieve from the hustle and bustle of areas like Shibuya, but still want to stay close to the action. With a famous market and the Sensō-ji Buddhist temple just a few

minutes away, you could spend easily spend countless hours exploring the area surrounding the hotel, before refueling at one of the delicious – and tiny – restaurants nearby. We also suggest doing the 20-minute walk to Akihabara if you want to explore some local side streets to really get a feel for a less touristy side of the city.

The hotel itself is a very comfortable base in terms of amenities. The rooms are large by Japan standards, however, asking for two twin beds is probably a good call if you’re traveling as a couple and accustomed to a queen or king at home (the largest beds in Japan are usually a double). Perhaps the most surprising feature of the hotel was the bathroom, with a shower that was basically a small room of its own – a luxury that is far from the norm in Japan. With a modern aesthetic and pristine common spaces, The Gate Hotel Kaminarimon is the perfect spot to unwind after a long day of sightseeing. Their restaurant offers a delicious

breakfast buffet, complete with a mix of traveler-friendly foods and more local fares, while allowing you to look out over the beautiful Tokyo skyline with a perfect view of the Tokyo Skytree. Their rooftop bar is elegant and unfussy, and the hotel offers little perks like free sparkling sake with edible cherry blossoms to make guests feel welcome. The Gate Hotel Kaminarimon has perfected the combination of comfort, luxury, and value. While it’s not the cheapest hotel in the city, staying here won’t break the bank – and what you get in return puts it at the top of our list. //// gate-hotel.jp

PHOTOS: THE GATE HOTEL KAMINARIMON

Experience

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Experience

BY MIRA BLUMENTHAL

London-based furniture and lighting line Sé Collections strikes a pleasing balance between luxury and sleekness. Their mission to “reclaim the glamour and quality of 20th century furniture” has undoubtedly been realized, and since their launch in 2007, they have

partnered with some of the best designers in the world to produce a collection of beautifully crafted furnishings and decorative objects. The Happiness Armchair, for example, was designed by Damien Langlois-Meurinne, an internationally renowned furniture designer. It is intended to be a “witty, exaggerated

remake of the traditional wing armchair,” and can be customized in any material. Similarly, the New Life Sofa, also designed by Langlois-Meurinne, was inspired by 1930s glamour, but maintains a polished and elegant silhouette. Every item that Sé Collection offers brings together Old World aesthetics with New World

designs. Their product line is an assortment of thoughtfully designed pieces, and their philosophy – to design “tactile and cerebral” pieces that invite one’s gaze and touch while engaging their mind – is undoubtedly achieved. //// se-collections.com

PHOTOS: SÉ COLLECTIONS

Upgrade Your Living Room with Sé Collections

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Lisbon’s Old and New B Y D R. T E D W I T E K A N D H I L D A YA S S E R I

In her introduction to Neal Slavin’s 1971 photo book Portugal, Mary McCarthy observes that while people visit Portugal to see the old, the Portuguese insist on showing them the new. Having lived in Lisbon, I return often to visit the spots I know and love – but I am constantly reminded to visit all that is new. Centuries ago, this tiny country explored and discovered some two-thirds of the known world, leaving an impact across the globe. Today, the Portuguese are proud soccer champions, having defeated France in the 2016 UEFA European Championship. Beyond the country’s interesting history and current soccer prestige, however, its food, wine, and cultural delights take center stage. During my last visit, I embraced the new by experiencing just a few of these delights.

José Avillez, one of Portugal’s most celebrated chefs, has six restaurants in Lisbon and one in Porto, the two most celebrated being Bairro do Avillez and the simply placed but upscale Belcanto. Bairro is a dynamic, open space that includes a mercearia and taberna where patrons can enjoy cocktails and some fresh ham. The restaurant’s patio offers friendly and sophisticated service. While there may be hundreds of ways to prepare traditional bacalhau – a dried, salted cod dish – you can stop your search for the perfect recipe after experiencing Avillez’s Lombo de Bacalhau. The Carabineiro Grande

Grelhado (giant grilled red shrimp) was also especially noteworthy. Belcanto is Avillez’s fine-dining experience. It offers a refined version of the traditional Portuguese culinary experience. We opted for the chef’s table tasting menu with wine pairings, and in return, we experienced three hours of sensory heaven. As Avillez explained, “We have so many culinary influences in this country giving us so many ingredients and recipes. My aim is to respect these old traditions, but also to prepare and present them in a new way.” These dishes included an Azorean Tuna “Bouquet,” its rolled treasures hidden in a small vase of flowers, and Algarve Scarlet Shrimp, which visited our table live before being presented with Xerém (maize porridge) and a crust of beetroot salt. The wine pairing, with selections ranging as far North as Douro and as far South as Alentejo, was impeccable. The biggest surprise was the non-vintage dessert wine Villa Oeiras, a vinho generoso.

MAAT: The Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology

PHOTOS: TED WITEK

José Avillez’s Culinary Kingdom

Lisbon is a beautiful city to walk in. One of the most pleasant places to walk is along the Tagus River just under the massive 25 de Abril Bridge (a replica of San Francisco’s Golden Gate). Here, you will find the recently opened Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology (MAAT). The MAAT blends old and new with its sleek, ripple-like design by Amanda Levete. The museum shares a certain level of

industrial boldness with the neighboring Tejo Power Station, itself a symbol of 20th-century industrialization. Lisbon’s newest icon is covered in 15,000 three-dimensional white ceramic tiles, which creates a harmonious transition between the river and city. The design of the MAAT reflects work from the three disciplines in its name. Former Museum of Modern Art curator Pedro Gadanho has been recruited back home to Portugal to direct the MAAT’s activities. He describes the recently opened masterpiece as “a cultural space of discovery, critical thinking, and dialogue.” Once again, Portugal has connected the world through its innovative thinking. ////

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ALWAYS x ALWAYS Towel

Pepper B. Pillows

Read two pages, get uncomfortable, change position. Read two pages, get uncomfortable, change position. Repeat for two hours, get fed up of lying on the beach, go home mid-afternoon. Then, feel angry with yourself for going home so early on such

a beautiful summer’s day – and for neglecting to finish your beach read. You deserve better than a traditional beach towel. Who wants to lie perfectly straight on a narrow rectangle? Even when you’re alone, getting comfortable is challenging. But if you want to lounge on the sand with some-

one else for a change, comfort is out of the question. Luckily, the solution is simpler than you might think: a circular towel. Made by ALWAYS x ALWAYS, the Round Palm Leaf Towel brings something new to the beach experience. The towel’s beautiful leaf design delicately evokes the serenity of the

natural world. At 60 inches in diameter, there is more than enough room for you – and someone else, if you’re hoping for a cozy afternoon – to carve out a gentle nook in the sand. No more uncomfortable beach days, no more unfinished beach reads, and no more wasted summer sun. ////

PHOTO: PEPPER B.

BY DOMINIC SMITH

PHOTO: ALWAYS X ALWAYS

BY DOMINIC SMITH

The perfect throw cushion should imbue your apartment with an air of love and care, bringing an element of class to your sitting room while also creating a cozy ambiance for those days spent curled up on the sofa. It’s a difficult mix to find, but one that Pepper B. Design has perfected with its latest cushion covers. For $73-79 USD, the Bloom Pillow combines a timeless floral design with a minimalist touch. The indigo, pink, or gray pattern (depending on your preference) is offset by a crisp, clean white. When paired with the playful, geometric lines of the Misfit Stripe Pillow, the cushion has the potential to create a seating experience equally fit for Friday night cocktails and Sunday afternoon movies. Danni Simmen, Pepper B. Design’s owner, designer, and creator, works with local Toronto artisans and small businesses to bring the products to life. Her active involvement means that all Pepper B. products maintain the high standard that the company was founded on. ////

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The Edgy Veg: 138 CarnivoreApproved Vegan Recipes

BY DOMINIC SMITH

PHOTO: BRAGI

A New World of Wireless Audio: The Headphone by Bragi

PHOTOS: THE EDGY VEG

Veganism is the coolest it’s ever been. Dinner parties are awash with vegan options, not to mention the many trendy plant-based restaurants popping up. Meanwhile, conversations around the benefits of a vegan lifestyle on both individual health and the environment abound. But there’s still one problem: No matter how much better veganism may be for your body and the planet, it doesn’t quite hit the spot when you’re craving junk or comfort food. All too often, you might find yourself throwing your moral stance out the window and ordering fried chicken or ribs to satiate your cravings instead. The Edgy Veg is a book created to address this very issue. The book’s recipes have all been created and written by Candice Hutchings – known for her popular vegan cooking YouTube channel, The Edgy Veg – and approved by her meat-loving husband, James Aita. The 138 recipes are part of a revolution to make vegan lifestyle accessible, especially for those who looking to live a a more eco-friendly lifestyle without having to compromise on their love of good food. The book is heavier in text than your average cookbook, with recipes that are designed to be approachable not only for readers who are new to veganism, but also to those who are new to the kitchen entirely. If you’re looking for a breakfast, brunch, lunch, snack, dinner, dessert, or midnight munchie that is both ethical and delicious, The Edgy Veg is the ultimate starter kit. ////

BY MIRA BLUMENTHAL

There are few things as relaxing as losing yourself in a song or a podcast. Blocking out the chaos of the day and immersing yourself in an audio experience can be a stress-relieving, endorphin-filled experience of delight. The Headphone by Bragi is the ideal partner for achieving this serene state – or for simply taking a conference call. With comfortable in-ear “FitTip” earbuds and six hours of battery life, these wireless headphones can help you block out noisy colleagues or jam to some tunes on the subway – and the sound quality is superb. The Knowles® Balanced Armature Speakers provide crisp, high-quality audio, and the Audio Transparency function allows you to hear what’s going on around you (if desired) without removing the buds from your ears. Of course, connecting wireless headphones via Bluetooth is never seamless, but once it has been connected initially, your device will continue to automatically recognize the headphones. The easy-to-use controls also allow you to take calls or connect to your phone’s digital assistant, making the Bragi headphones just as user-friendly – and a whole lot cooler – than regular headphones. ////

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The Rise of Minimalist Design in London’s Food Cultures BY ALEXIS SCOBIE AND KISHAN WADHIA

Brutal. Raw. Concrete. The term “Brutalism” was coined by French architect Le Corbusier when referencing his use of béton brut (raw concrete). The term was then adapted by architectural critic Reyner Banham, who used “Brutalism” to refer to elements of the 20th-century style. Brutalist architecture is characterized by structures that have a raw nature, evoking a sense naked modernity. The style is easy to identify due to its unfinished surfaces and large, obtrusive masses. For centuries, London has been recognized as a hub for Brutalism, with Brutalist structures ranging from the Barbican Arts Centre to the Royal Festival Hall in Southbank. And while Londoners did not always take to the Brutalist facades popping up all around their city, these structures are now widely recognized as crucial aspects of London’s architectural history and culture. Today, Brutalist influences have started to appear in other industries – including the food industry. East London’s food cultures are a prime example of these shifts and trends, which can be seen in everything from food packaging, to restaurant design, to brand story. This shift begs the question: Are these Brutalist influences merely a trend, or will they be foundational to the future of the industry?

Food Packaging

Restaurant Design

Brutalist influences are changing the ways in which food is packaged. Just as Brutalist buildings stand out against London’s other architectural backgrounds, Brutal foods are intended to stand out on the shelf. Because this method involves the use of raw and natural materials, Brutalist food packaging is ideal for showcasing foods made with natural, holistic, and healthy ingredients. Using this style helps to create a consumer perception of artisanship, craftsmanship, and sustainability. Similarly, the food industry is bringing back traditional boxed food packaging and more geometric shapes. Brutalist materials, such as wood, crate paper, and handwritten typography, make products feel local and personal. They create a sense of authenticity and encourage consumers to build trust with brands and products from a place of relatability and realness.

Brutalist buildings evoke a sense of escape from the norm. Their rigidity creates clean, simplistic lines and perceptions of order, further facilitating a sense of calm. In the food industry, Brutalist design principles are moving beyond ingredients and products and into restaurant interiors and experiences. Restaurants are choosing to use classic materials like concrete, wood, scaffolding, bare brick, and metals rather than upscale, clean materials. In fact, walking into a coffee shop in East London may feel more like walking into a warehouse than a place for afternoon tea. Take, for example, Attendant, a hipster coffee bar situated in Shoreditch that bases their design philosophy and experience on the concept of creating something “perfectly imperfect.” They take cues from the environment around the store, repairing and upcycling materials and furniture. Each café is designed and curated with its environment in mind using natural materials like white wash and zinc countertops to create a Brutalist, modern environment.

Departure Questions: / How might companies strategically use Brutalist design principles in order to create more natural, authentic products and experiences? / What if the human interactions of experience design were inspired by the same principles? What could this look like? / What if there was a Brutalist digital user experience? What would a more natural, raw, concrete online experience look like? //// Alexis Scobie is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture. Kishan Wadhia is a graphic designer Idea Couture.

East London’s Brutalist Tour Architecture: The Barbican Centre/The Barbican Estate, Salters’ Hall, Keeling House Adding to the London skyline, the iconic architecture from the 1950s is still occupied, adored, and despised by many.

Coffee: The Attendant, Ozone Coffee Roasters, C.R.E.A.M. (a café by Protein Studios), Monmouth Coffee These cafés, which have embraced the Brutalist culture, are some of our regular hangouts.

Dinner: Rök This fairly new restaurant venue has wood- and concrete-based interiors and serves “Brutal” food.

ILLUSTRATION: KISHAN WADHIA

Brutal Food: The Rise of Minimalist Design in London’s Food Cultures

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B Y TAY LO R D E N N IS

Since 1987, Caesarstone has been gaining attention – and market share – for its premium quartz surfaces. From elegant kitchen countertops to premium stone flooring, Caesarstone has set the bar for modern interior design with its many color, shape, and design options. Joining the company’s line-up of contemporary quartz décor is the Caesarstone Wall Clock Collection. The collection currently

includes three color options – Fresh Concrete, Frosty Carrina, and Vanilla Noir – to suit the unique aesthetic of your home or office space. At nearly 20 inches in diameter, these large clocks are perfect for making a bold statement in a smaller room or adding a final touch to an expertly curated space. You may even find a perfect pairing for your much-loved Caesarstone kitchen countertops. //// caesarstoneus.com

PHOTOS: CAESARSTONE

Be Trendy and on Time With a Caesarstone Wall Clock