The Purpose Economy: Creating a Human Centric Society

Several weeks ago I was fortunate enough to participate in the first ever Zag Talks, Gonzaga’s local version of TED Talks. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to give my talk on the need to update our concept of work in the 21st century. You can watch the talk below:

Since giving this talk, however, I’ve begun to realize that despite making some strong points about the need for well-rounded organizations and meaningful work, it has several significant problems:

1. First, it makes it sound like purposeful work is reserved for only the select few who are lucky enough to work for a triple bottom line organization. There are tons of people who experience purpose in their work with all types of organizations.
2. Second, it makes it sound like low level jobs such as administrative assistants, hotel clerks and waiters are not noble careers. Many people derive a great deal of purpose from these jobs and others like them.
3. Third, I don’t give a definitive reason why organizations should change their models and embrace a triple bottom line.

I want to expand on my talk and address these issues in this post. Based on my experiences with the Opus Prize and my exploration into the topics of social entrepreneurship and impact careers, I would like to make the claim that if we want to create a more peaceful, equitable world, we need to set a goal of providing every working age adult with a quality job that gives them a sense of purpose.

To understand my rational we need to consider Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In Maslow’s hierarchy, there is a natural order in which human beings are driven to fulfill our desires, starting with the basic physiological needs to eat, sleep and stay hydrated. These physiological needs, as Maslow terms them, are essential desires that help us continue to survive. As these needs are taken care of, we gradually transition towards addressing our need for safety. This need includes our desire to be free from fear, overwhelming anxiety and chaos. As we structure our environment and make sense of our surroundings, we begin to feel a strong desire for belonging, which is the basic human hunger for relationships. We strive to overcome loneliness and become part of a larger group in order to develop a sense of who we are. Next, we encounter our desire for self-esteem and respect in the eyes of others. Fulfilling our desires for achievement, independence, recognition and prestige allows us to feel valuable and important, an essential piece of being human. These four categories of needs are referred to as deficit needs, meaning that you feel the desire to fill them when they are running low. If you have enough water you simply say you “Don’t feel thirsty”. If you feel secure, chances are you won’t think to yourself how nice it is to be safe. In this way, as you satisfy these needs, you return to an equilibrium rather than experiencing a psychological high. Typically you don’t feel any lasting sense of wellbeing after gratifying these needs, just the emergence of the next level of need.

If we want to create a more peaceful, equitable world, we need to set a goal of providing every working age adult with a quality job that gives them a sense of purpose.

The last level of Maslow’s hierarchy, however, is different than the other four. Self-Actualization refers to “man’s desire for self-fulfillment”, or in other words, the human desire to “become everything that one is capable of becoming” (quoted from Maslow’s book “Motivation and Personality”, p 46). The way this desire can be fulfilled varies greatly from individual to individual. For some people “it may take the form of the desire to be an ideal mother, in another it may be expressed athletically, and in still another it may be expressed in painting pictures or in inventions” (46). As opposed to being a deficit need, self-actualization is a being-need: as it is fed, it continues to grow stronger and it gives us a feeling of well-being and fulfillment. This is the epitome of humanness, attaining one’s potential by fully expressing oneself. Maslow estimated that only about 2% of people achieve this level of needs gratification. Since self-actualization is conditional upon the fulfillment of one’s lower level needs, our ability to achieve this level of humanness is inextricably tied to the health of our ecosystem. If our ecosystem provides us with the opportunity to seek information, speak freely, express ourselves and do whatever we want without hurting others, the odds of being able to self-actualize grow larger. Since this is the case, many people are not able to self actualize due to the conditions of their environment, not because of their lack of willpower or effort. A young Syrian girl in a refugee camp in Turkey stands little to no chance of achieving her full potential, while her counterpart in suburban Ohio who has strong support from her family, her community and the broader society in the form of public services has much more control over her ability to self-actualize.

“Human life will never be understood”, Maslow said, “unless its highest aspirations are taken into account. Growth, self-actualization, the striving toward health, the quest for identity and autonomy, the yearning for excellence (and other ways of phrasing the striving “upward”) must by now be accepted beyond question as a widespread and perhaps universal human tendency”. This is the foundation for my assertion that we must work to provide every working age adult with a purposeful job. It goes like this:

1. There is a universal pull on human beings to self-actualize and reach their potential.

2. If we make it possible for individuals to achieve their potential, the outpouring of human innovation and creativity will produce bottom-up solutions to the pressing social problems of the 21^st century.

3. In order to help more individuals to achieve their potential, we need to shape the driving force of industrial society, the economy, in such a way so that it promotes the goal of human self-actualization. This can be achieved by providing everyone with the opportunity to have a purposeful job.

To put it mildly, our current economic system does not promote the goal of self-actualization… it promotes wealth accumulation, which can go directly against the idea of cultivating human potential. However with that said, I think it can be pivoted in order to align with such a vision. I believe it is possible to create an environment where the opportunity to self-actualize is a possibility for everyone, and where the benefits of self-actualization (a sense of personal well-being and peak productivity) would motivate individuals to work and succeed.

To understand why I think that, lets analyze the issue. The fundamental problem with our current economic model is that we’ve convinced ourselves that money is the end goal: it can buy happiness, and accumulating it gives us access to the things that fulfill our desires. I know that sounds like a broken record, we tell ourselves all the time that money isn’t the key to happiness, but do we live that out? Lets do a quick experiment: Watch these three advertisements and count how many times you see something other than the products delivering happiness:

– – – – –

– – – – –

These ads are classic examples of the double standard we have in our society: we verbalize that things don’t buy happiness, but we’re constantly bombarded with messages that tell us the opposite and we internalize them unconsciously. An article published last year reports that the average American watches 5 hours of TV per day, and that roughly an hour of that time is paid advertisements! If the average advertisement lasts for 30 seconds, that’s over 100 ads per day telling you, like the three ads above, that you need to buy things in order to be happy… and that’s not even counting the hundreds of other messages that reach you through other mediums. It’s a dangerous double standard, and if we want to reshape the economy to promote self-actualization, we need to start by shifting this message.

Rather than selling products that aim to increase profit, we need to sell products that, by their very nature, aim to improve the lives of our fellow man.

So how can we fix this problem? We need to pivot the economy. Rather than selling products that aim to increase profit, we need to sell products that, by their very nature, aim to improve the lives of our fellow man. We need to create a sense of purpose by moving towards a people-centric economic system. In this system, companies and organizations deliver value to society by creating purpose for their customers, their employees and their supply chains, and the profits they make go towards making their impact sustainable. This is the vision laid out by entrepreneur Aaron Hurst in his book “The Purpose Economy”, and it’s a vision that has begun to manifest itself through the rise of the sharing economy (e.g. Zipcar, Uber, Airbnb) and purpose driven products and services such as Tom’s shoes, Warby Parker glasses and Whole Foods organic produce. In the industrialized world, “most people’s basic needs for sustenance, shelter, and information are met. Accordingly, we have emerged from the Agrarian, Industrial, and Information economies to the Purpose Economy, that we might fulfill our higher-order needs: meaning and purpose” (The Purpose Economy, 44). In this way, Maslow’s hierarchy predicts the evolution of human society, and the transition from the Information economy to the Purpose economy.

– – – – –

But what exactly is purpose, and how can companies deliver it? As human beings we experience purpose in three ways, according to Hurst:

1. Personal Purpose: Doing things we love, attempting new challenges and expressing our voice to the world.

2. Social Purpose: Developing meaningful relationships that reinforce our sense of value, require us to engage, and which ultimately help us learn and grow.

3. Societal Purpose: Contributing to a greater cause we believe matters to others, to society and to ourselves. This is the most powerful source of purpose.

All of these sources of purpose are important, but according to Hurst, societal purpose is the most powerful. “Societal purpose isn’t isolated to volunteering and philanthropy, or careers in education and social work”, he says, “we can also derive purpose through decisions about how we consume, from decreasing our carbon footprint to buying local produce at the farmers’ market. We can also discover meaning through our daily work, where we help the people on our teams and provide customers with our products and services” (The Purpose Economy, 28).

Purposeful consumption and work is the beginning of a major shift in how we buy and sell products and live our lives. Over the past 40 years as the information economy has progressed work has become more segmented and specialized. As a result a workers’ average tenure at a given company has dropped to 4.5 years and work has become inherently unstable. As Hurst puts it, “The instability caused by these major structural changes and magnified by the economic recession brought with it a need to find stability and a future path within ourselves, rather than from an employer… purpose, rather than career longevity, now provides the stability we need” (36). In the Purpose economy, the purpose organizations create through their products and services is the key to ensuring high employee morale, customer satisfaction and supply chain stability. Take for example Rebuild Globally, the social enterprise I am interning with this summer in Port-au-Prince, Haiti:

Rather than orienting themselves around maximizing profit, Rebuild’s main priority is providing purpose for their stakeholders:

1. Employees: By offering high quality employment and paying over two times Haiti’s minimum daily wage, Rebuild Globally offers its employees the change to make a living and develop themselves as individuals. Employees can afford to send their children to school and support their communities.
2. Customers: Each purchase of a pair of sandals from Rebuild Globally gives the customer purpose because they know they are contributing towards the empowerment of Rebuild’s employees and stewarding the environment by reusing tires. Rebuild also runs an apprenticeship program for youth in Port-au-Prince partially funded by sandal sales, so each purchase goes towards empowering Haiti’s youth and future leaders.
3. Supply Chain: Rebuild’s leather supplier earned more than the daily minimum wage just through their contract with Rebuild, allowing them not only to support their family, but also take part in the empowerment of Haitian artisans and youth.

– – – – –

One important note to address is that, although there will always be undesirable jobs in society, this does not mean that the people working in those jobs are exempt from the possibility of finding purpose in their work. Aaron Hurst makes the claim that purpose is not a noun describing meaningful jobs, it’s a verb describing the way you approach your work. Angelo Bruno and Eddie Nieves are a perfect example of this concept in action. These two men worked as partners on the same garbage route in Manhattan for almost a decade, and after Angelo retired, the two spoke about the lessons he learned from being a garbage cleaner:

Angelo found purpose in his job by imbuing it with social and societal purpose. Thanks to the relationships he cultivated and the impact he saw his work having, the value of his work became apparent to him and he found a deep sense of purpose that helped him to serve his community for over three decades and that made it difficult for him to give it up.

This is the value of the Purpose economy. It creates meaning and connection, it helps us grow as people, and ultimately, it gives us the ability to address the social problems of the 21^st century by empowering more people to be all they can be. By helping people reach their potential and fostering a human-centric society, we truly can change the world.

You can buy Aaron Hurst’s book “The Purpose Economy” on Amazon by clicking here.