Henry Ford once said, “If I asked the customer what he wanted, he would have said, ‘a faster horse.’” A customer who has never imagined an automobile, cannot ask for one.
Similarly, many organizational leaders, constrained by past learning, cannot imagine an organization with a fully-engaged workforce, willing contributions, spontaneous collaboration, and extraordinary outcomes. To access this image, leaders must acquire a new worldview, the perspective of a twice-born leader, someone who, usually through crisis, is jolted and required to rethink his or her worldview. In the process leaders begin to imagine what the conventional mind cannot. They see and utilize the power of higher purpose—an authentic intention that brings meaning to pursuit of business goals and transforms motivation.
In this book Robert E. Quinn and Anjan J. Thakor offer a new logic that builds on the assumptions of economics and opens a new path to learning based on clearly articulating an organization’s higher purpose and intersecting it with the organization’s strategy. They explain why numerous books and articles on higher purpose have failed to gain traction in the workplace. They then offer a practical and counter-intuitive framework for imagining and creating an organization of higher purpose. And they show how to put into practice an eight-step approach to articulating higher purpose and how to weave it into the fabric of the organization.