PURPOSE – Mission Critical or Hipster Wishy-Washy?

RanDenHeYi model – Purpose Driven Management

What’s your Purpose for Business

At the heart of everyone is the desire to do well. There’s something at our core that wants to make a difference. To see a better world and to be part of making it happen. We feel a pull towards creating something better than what our parents had. The need to make improvements so that those that come after us are better off. This is the meaning of purpose.

Few leaders and even fewer business leaders see purpose as a completely new operating system. A new way of doing business. A new approach to management. But for the ones that do, the results have been astonishing.

Zhang Huimin is one of those radicals. He’s the CEO of the worlds biggest appliance manufacturers based in Qingdao, China. Zhang Huimin took the step of removing ALL middle management from his corporation. Instead, he offered them a chance to become entrepreneurs within the organisation but autonomous and free to set their own rules. These new business leaders set their own strategy, prices, salaries, bonuses and managed their own recruitment.

Companies like Roche India and GE (as well as US Special Forces) have adopted his RenDanHeYi management system with amazing results. Many of the worlds great leadership thought leaders hail the transformation as remarkable.

And Zhang Ruimin’s secret to it all is purpose. He recognised that everyone is deeply motivated to work where they can make a difference in the lives of others. It was quantum physics that caught Huimin’s attention. For centuries, astrologers, scientists and physicians all agreed that atoms were made of matter. They had mass, substance and it could be measured. A beam of light was just light particles bouncing off or penetrating a surface.

But when the beam of light was measured as energy, something happened. Light waves were formed and these were a frequency or energy and so light is made up of both particles and energy. A symbiosis of differing but measurable elements that worked together but in different ways. The mass or particles of business are its substance, what it does, what it produces, its output. The energy of a business its purpose. Purpose is the glue that makes businesses perform to reach their aims and objectives, its vision.

Teams may well understand the product, how it’s made and what it does, but they are driven to succeed because they all believe that what they are doing makes a difference to their customers’ lives. It improves them.

Purpose is the main ingredient in any business. Without purpose, teams flounder and the most talented leave.

My thoughts here have been developed after reading Zero Distance by Danah Zohar.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash