I’m often asked about my job title—”Purpose to Impact Advisor.” People ask me, “what does that really mean?” As someone who worked in the developing world for a decade as a social entrepreneur, I was neck-deep in “impact”. I launched a network of eco-friendly taxis in Lima Peru and later launched a renewable energy company delivering energy to communities in 30 countries at the Base of the Economic Pyramid. So my own journey of awakening took me from Silicon Valley “high-tech” to an exploration of we might call “high purpose.” I believed that business, re-engineered for the working poor, was the best tool for poverty alleviation. Want to end poverty? Help poor people earn more money. So if making money was not the primary driver for me, what was it? My deeper purpose was to serve the world. Finding myself in the context of business, my purpose was and is to heal the wound between money and meaning, profit and purpose, to enable business to be a force for good in the world. But how do we actually do that?
Business can be a vehicle for developing yourself and your teams internally as well as for delivering value to the outer world. Change happens from the inside out, from the individual through the collective. At work, we complete the energetic circuit moving from deeper purpose through a developmental culture, guided by authentic leadership to deliver impact to the wider world. To keep leaders who embrace the aspirational idea of purpose and conscious or developmental culture, they need to “walk their talk” by delivering meaningful and positive impact in the world aligned with their purpose. Furthermore, all purpose ultimately resolves to a desire to serve a calling or cause larger than oneself. And the larger the calling, the more people we can attract—employees, customers, suppliers and investors. So if leaders want to tap the infinite wellspring of intrinsic motivation of their teams and win the good opinion of the market at large, I invite them to “play a bigger game and take a longer view.” Purpose and its expression in meaningful impact is the through line running through the hearts of every disaffected worker and the troubled world in which we live. By scaffolding that connection, I think professional catalysts and change makers like Syntropy can help us usher in the more just, humane and sustainable human presence on this earth that we all really want.