Chapman, B., & Sisodia, R. (2015). Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family. New York: Portfolio/Penguin.
Joly, H., & Lambert, C. (2021). The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism. Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press.
Mayer, C. (2018). Prosperity: Better Business Makes the Greater Good. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Serafeim, G. (2022). Purpose and Profit: How Business Can Lift Up the World. Nashville: HarperCollins Leadership.
You can grow more quantity and higher quality of food in a healthier ecosystem of nutrients, sun, and water, than you can in a depleted ecosystem that lacks these key factors for growing food. Likewise, people flourish better when they are engaged in a thriving ecosystem that improves their physical, mental, social, and spiritual health, far more than when they are disengaged in a depleted ecosystem that deteriorates their physical, mental, social, and spiritual health. Hopefully, both of these examples seem obvious. Yet, most people don’t run their organizations as if this were true. And, some do.
The four books I reference above, by a couple of business leaders and a couple of business scholars, all show what organizations are finding out about how to improve the quality of the ecosystem they depend on for their survival. In its most basic form, an organization depends on the revenues or funds from serving customers, people whose needs for a product or service they are satisfying. No customers, no inflow of funding. The organization also depends on the communities and regulators where they operate to give them permission to operate. No permission, no operation. Organizations also depend on the support of people who do the work to transform inputs into the products and services the organization offers, whether employees, contractors, or suppliers. If nobody transforms the inputs, there is no offering. And, organizations depend on the inflow of monies from equityholders (investors) and debtholders (banks). No capital, no organization. These holders of the needs, permission, and support form the organization’s immediate ecosystem of relationships. If this ecosystem is healthy, the organization has a higher probability of survival than if the ecosystem is weak. Yet, most organizations are designed to extract value from some of these stakeholders to serve others, which ends up depleting the very ecosystem they depend on for survival. These four books show how strengthening this ecosystem of relationships leads to stronger, more profitable, engaging, and profitable organizations.
Oxford Professor Mayer wonders why this is not obvious, why have organizations evolved into extractive forms? “The corporation is the creator of wealth, the source of employment, the deliverer of new technologies, the provider of our needs, the satisfier of our desires, and the means to our ends. It clothes, feeds, and houses us…At the same time, it is the source of inequality, deprivation, and environmental degradation…But is the corporation capable of bearing the responsibilities being placed on its shoulders? The evidence is not encouraging”…How do we make it the creator of prosperity of the many not just the few? (pp1-2). In this book, Mayer takes “you across history, around the world, through philosophy and biology to business, law, economics, and finance to arrive at an understanding of where we have gone wrong, why, how we can put it right, and what specifically we need to do about it. It will provide you with an understanding of why our businesses and corporations are such powerful instruments for advancing human well-being and how their incorrect depiction has had such devastating consequences for our societies, politics, and environment” (p12). He suggests that we “get credit where credit is due but not where it comes from the damage you do” (p137).
Joly and Lambert describe the experience at Best Buy in “embracing and mobilizing all stakeholders,” where they inquired how they went about “delighting customers,” “partnering with vendors and competitors,” “helping the community thrive,” while “rewarding shareholders” (pp82-91). To align an organization around its deeper purpose, Joly led an effort to connect dreams, develop human connections, foster autonomy, achieve mastery, put the wind at your back, and focus on purposeful leadership.
Chapman and Sisodia provide examples of how they treat the people who show up to support the transformation of inputs into outputs, the employees. They describe what BarryWhemiller has learned about the guiding principles of leadership, where they “measure success by the way (they) touch the lives of people” (p53). “Truly human leadership means sending people home safe, healthy, and fulfilled” (p71). “Trust is the foundation of all relationships; act accordingly” (p116).
Harvard Business School Professor Serafeim shares research that shows that “purpose-driven enterprises that genuinely create value for society do better, and the effect only increases over time” (p11). The research shows that “purpose-driven companies..perform substantially better than their competitors, with significant, positive risk-adjusted stock returns of above 6 percent annually. This may be in part because they are attracting better workers, or because their workers are motivated to work harder when they believe in the purpose of their job. It may be in part because customers see these same signals and would like to do business with those companies or buy their products, and are even willing to pay a premium to do so. Purpose and success are shown by the research to be closely aligned” (p20).
Four explorations by reflective practitioners, from company leaders and from scholars, about what we can do to generate greater health in the very ecosystems our organizations depend on for survival. I highly recommend these four books.
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Reflections of a Pactoecographer 