What's Your Company's Sentence?
My friend Dan Pink has just released a new book, calledDrive, which explores "the surprising truths about what motivates us." In it, he identifies with clarity (and cleverness) the three big drivers of performance and success: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Dan's advice speaks to individual performance, but some of it applies equally to business performance. With regard to having a sense of purpose, for example, he urges individuals to ask a question of themselves that I believe executives should also ask of their companies.
Dan tells a story about Clare Booth Luce, the playwright, journalist, and Republican Member of Congress. In 1962, Luce met with President Kennedy, who was, at the time, pursuing an ambitious agenda domestically and overseas. She worried about his diffuse priorities. "A great man," she advised him, "is one sentence." President Lincoln's sentence was obvious: "He preserved the union and freed the slaves." So was FDR's: "He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war." What, Luce challenged the young, impatient president, was to be his sentence?
What a powerful question — not just for great presidents, but for great companies, too.
Time and again, as I've gotten to know companies that are winning big in tough industries, I've been struck by the clarity and simplicity of the one idea that drives them — their version of Luce's sentence. Here's Southwest Airlines: "We democratize the skies and give people the freedom to fly." Here's ING Direct: "We lead Americans back to savings." Here's Google: "We organize the word's information and make it universally accessible and useful."
The lesson is as simple as it is subversive: It's not good enough to be pretty good at everything. You have to be the most of something: the most elegant, the most colorful, the most responsive, the most focused. For decades, organizations and their leaders were comfortable with strategies that kept them in the middle of the road — that's what felt safe and secure. In the new world of business, with so much change, so much pressure, so many new ways to do things, the middle of the road is the road to nowhere. As Jim Hightower, the colorful Texas populist, is fond of saying,"There's nothing in the middle of the road but yellow stripes and dead armadillos."
Roy Spence, another Texas populist, and one of the toughest-minded business thinkers I know, is a cofounder of GSD&M, the legendary advertising agency based in Austin. In a provocative and brassy book, It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For, Spence explains the easy-to-understand ideas behind the one-of-a-kind organizations he has studied or worked with over the years, from BMW to Whole Foods Market to the U.S. Air Force. Sure, these and other organizations are built around strong leaders, stellar offerings, and (of course) clever ads. But Spence is adamant that behind every great brand is an authentic sense of purpose — "a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world" — and a workplace with the "energy and vitality" to bring that purpose to life.
His own firm walks the purpose-driven talk. His coauthor, Haley Rushing, serves as GSD&M's "chief purposologist" and cofounder of its Purpose Institute. Spence and Rushing argue that the virtue of being clear about purpose — what makes your organization different, what difference it is trying to make in its field and in the lives of its employees — is that it creates the strength to resist mimicking the stale ideas and outmoded practices of the competition. "You can look at an opportunity or a challenge," they explain, "and ask yourself, 'Is this the right thing to do given our purpose? Does this further our cause?' If it does, you do it. If it doesn't, you don't. If it's proof to your purpose, embrace it. If it violates your purpose, kick it out on its ass." (I told you the book was brassy.)
In a chapter on the culture at Texas A&M, the huge (48,000 students), conservative, steeped-in-tradition university that traces its history to 1871, Spence and Rushing highlight a saying about the school that students have been reciting for decades: "From the outside looking in, you can't understand it. From the inside looking out, you can't explain it." That's a neat way to capture how it feels when your organization has a profound sense of itself — so profound that it can be passed on without articulation.
Most companies don't have that deep and driving sense of purpose. So as you gear up for another year, one that promises to be every bit as tough and trying as last year, help it along by posing the question Clare Booth Luce asked of a president: What's your sentence?
