>> Kevin Espirito: Thank you all for joining us today. My name Kevin Espirito, I manage
employee community engagement; that’s the Microsoft giving campaign, the volunteer
programs, all of the good, fun stuff at Microsoft. So for those of you who have been around for
awhile you know that we have a very long history and culture of giving at Microsoft and our
employees are amazing, you all are amazing. We reached 113 million dollars last year, record
breaking campaign and that’s over a billion dollars since this program started back in 1983, the
giving campaign.
>>: Yay.
[Clapping]
>> Kevin Espirito: Yes, great stuff and any of you who have seen me in the past know that I am
always up for giving a free plug for the giving campaign. We are very lucky to have Aaron
Hurst here today to talk about his new book The Purpose Economy. I have had the pleasure of
working with Aaron when he was the CEO of Taproot, the Taproot foundation where he was
CEO and founder and worked for a dozen or so years. Aaron has also been extremely active in
founding some of the pro bono inactivates across our nation and is just a fantastic, wonderful
person, especially in this space. So, without further adieu I would like to have Aaron come up
and talk about his new book.
[Clapping]
>> Aaron Hurst: Thank you so much. Awesome, thank you Kevin, it’s been great to be a friend
of Microsoft for so many years and I have actually been to many, many Microsoft offices, but
never to the mother ship, so it’s great to be at the mother ship. We are going to be talking today
about purpose and work and since I have never been here before I would love to just start by just
asking you guys, “What do you love about working at Microsoft?” Just a couple of people so I
can just get a taste of what it is that --.
>>: It is speakers like you.
>> Aaron Hurst: There you go, that is the best answer I have heard anywhere. I don’t know
anybody who can top that.
>>: Great people.
>> Aaron Hurst: Great people, yep awesome, what else?
>>: Changing the world.
>> Aaron Hurst: Changing the world, awesome. This side of the room, is this the side? It’s like
a wedding, these are like the love Microsoft, looking for another job. What’s on this side?
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: Why are you guys here? Why do you love working here?
>>: The drinks.
>> Aaron Hurst: The drinks, free milk, so just like third grade, nice.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: All right.
>>: Difference, you know, scales, it makes a difference.
>> Aaron Hurst: Being able to make a difference by scaling ideas and solutions, awesome.
That’s great, it’s always great, I always hear different things going to different companies and
it’s really helpful just to hear sort of what the passion is. What is it that connects people to the
organization where they spend the majority of their waking hours?
I am going to be talking today about my new book, The Purpose Economy, that came out a
couple of months ago. And one thing just as background I wrote this book using crowdsourcing.
So I wrote the book last summer, about a year ago and the publisher worked with me to actually
print 2,000 copies and send it to my network and asked people to contribute stories, data, better
arguments, etc. And we got back just tons and tons of emails with suggestions and ideas. The
book that is being sold at an incredibly low, discounted price, today only, in the back, actually is
only about 20 percent the book I wrote. The other 80 percent came out of being able to reach out
to the community and gathering content and ideas from other people.
So it was a lot of fun, but one of the pieces of feedback was from a friend and he was like,
“Dude, why are you writing a book that no one reads?” I was like, “Oh, I don’t really know
what to do with that feedback, right”. That’s kind of hard, it’s like all of a sudden if you make
cars and nobody drives, why are you making a car? So I thought a lot about that piece of
feedback and was like he’s kind of right. Most business books, maybe people buy them, but only
very few actually finish reading them. So I hired a cartoonist and you will see in the book that
each section in the book has a cartoon summary of that section. So I just wanted to let you guy
know that incase any of you don’t read or can’t read. You can still consume this book.
So this is my cartoon me who you will meet throughout the presentation today. So the core of
the book, the core idea actually was inspired by a number of things, but one of them was my
uncle who was an economist at Stanford and coined the term “Information Economy” back in the
70s and proved that the information economy had become the dominant driver o f the US
economy and increasingly global economy. Actually, at a point in the 60s it had become the
leading driver of economic growth at output.
But he also, in his 9 volume dissertation, which I have never seen, I have read summaries of it,
which was good enough, no cartoons, but it was good. He basically helped me understand how
the economy has changed over time. And I came to understand it through this little diagram,
which is that we basically started off as apes. Does anyone disagree with that? Occasionally I
am in an audience where someone has to like contradict that point. Okay, we are good here? So
we started off as apes, we still are apes, but we became an erect ape over millions and millions of
years, right. But, one of the things that characterized us as human beings is that we are impatient
bastards, right. We are an impatient lot and we weren’t happy with the fact that evolution was
taking millions and millions of years. And we decided to take evolution into our own hands and
hack evolution, right. We decided to hack it and speed it up. And first we created an agrarian
economy where we used the land, animals, etc, to be able to extend our lifespan, increase our
quality of life. We hacked the environment to basically accelerate our evolution.
We then said, “You know what, that’s not good enough, we want to be stronger.” So we started
extracting minerals from the earth creating machines that had strength and the ability to move
things much faster, much stronger than we ever could have through natural evolution. We had
hacked it once again. Finally we said, “We also want to be smarter” and we hacked evolution
again and found ways to process and access information in a way in which we never would never
have been able to do just through natural evolution. It was sort of a third chapter of hacking
evolution. Does that all make sense?
So what’s interesting about this? A couple of things: one and you may or may not believe in the
hypothesis of the book, but I think one thing that I really want to leave you with is a question that
you should ponder tonight and tomorrow and maybe even the next day. Is the information
economy the last stop on the train? Are we done hacking evolution? Will our species sort of say
this is the final chapter, done, sold, we have completed our hacking of evolution or is there
another chapter and many chapters ahead in the way in which we will evolve over the coming
years?
It’s sort of a challenging question, like I think a lot of times people think, “Oh the information
economy that is innovation that is growth, that’s where everything is going to be forever.” If you
look at it just from pattern recognition it seems almost implausible that this is the last economy
that we will ever have, right. Secondly, if you look at these this took millions of years,
thousands of years, hundreds of years and this is likely to last dozens of years. And in fact if you
just look at it as a projection we are probably 10 to 20 years away from the next major economy
in our global history. And it’s really fascinating just to think about what that could be and as an
entrepreneur and being among people who are innovators it’s a really interesting question to
think about. When you think about how much the information economy changed the workplace,
it changed every type of company out there, etc, that that whole process could begin again and to
have that kind of transformation and disruption happen again in the next 10 to 20 years is an
incredible opportunity.
So, what would this next economy be? There are a couple of different ways of looking at it. I
spent a couple of years just reading magazines, talking to CEOs and trying to understand where
are we seeing signs of what the next economy might be? How can we make an educated guess?
There is no way of knowing for sure. And one of the things that really struck me is I was
looking at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Do people remember Maslow from Psyc 101? So it’s
not a perfect model, but I think from a storytelling and understanding perspective it’s interesting
to think about that we basically have these base needs for survival, you know food, shelter, etc.
But, as those needs become sort of more or less taken for granted we start focusing on the next
order of magnitude needs. And as you look at this hacking of evolution what you see generally
is a further and further evolution towards generations that are focused on the next order of
magnitude needs. And as you look at the millennial generation, which has been studied ad
nauseum the three things that really define this generation are the desire for greater relationships,
the desire to do something greater than themselves and the desire for personal growth. Those are
the three things you see over and over again define this generation. And what those things are is
really purpose. When you look at the definition of purpose that’s what purpose is and it’s getting
towards these higher order of magnitude needs.
And you are seeing more and more within the professional classes, who are the ones who define
the start of an economy, there is less of a few of “Where am I going to sleep tonight?” There is
not really a fear of “Where is my next meal going to come from, it’s the Microsoft cafeteria.”
The fear is, “Will I have a life without meaning? Will I have a life that doesn’t matter?” It’s a
fundamental fear of irrelevance and of not making a difference in the world and having an
impact. This is driving an incredible anxiety of this generation, this desire for purpose.
I think way I sort of came to this conclusion was, again going back to biology, and if you see
let’s say a frog on the ground and it just looks a little weird, like it has an extra leg or something
and your are like, “Wow, that’s a mutation, that’s kind of weird, right”. And then you see a tree
that looks a little off and you see a bird that looks a little off and you are like, “That’s weird”.
But, when you see all the frogs having that mutation, all the trees, all the birds you say, “Wait a
sec, this isn’t just random mutation, and we are actually seeing a biological event. We are seeing
a fundamental shift in the ecosystem of that environment.”
And as I was looking around at the places where innovation is really happing now are around the
sharing economy, the maker economy, freelance economy, etc. I mean there’s about a dozen of
these sort of micro mutations to parts of the economy and you say, “Okay, there is all these weird
mutations of frogs that look a little funny, trees that look a little funny and birds that look a little
funny. What do they all have in common? What’s going on here?” The common thread is
purpose. These are all being driven by these three elements of purpose: relationships, doing
something greater than yourself and personal growth. And if you look at them in totality is
explains why, from my point of view, the next era of our economy will likely be one driven by
purpose, just based on the evidence on the ground and the generation that’s really, given timing,
likely to drive this.
So, as Kevin said, I was the founder of the Taproot foundation back in 2001, which is a nonprofit and the goal was to ensure that every non-profit has access to the marketing, technology,
HR and strategy services they need, because just like companies, non-profits need these
resources and it’s vital to ensure that they have them even if they can’t afford them. And we
built it out across the US; we built the overall marketplace into a 15 billion dollar a year
marketplace, parallel to philanthropy. And it was incredibly enriching, it was wonderful, but
ultimately I left Taproot because of this quote, which is, “I find pro bono work so much more
rewarding than a paycheck job.” And at first this was actually the reason I stayed at Taproot. I
was like, “Hot damn, we did it, we created Disneyland, right, and we created the Disneyland of
work. We created the happiest place on earth”. But, then I realized what does that actually say
about what we go back to after Disneyland? What does it actually say about what we go back to
after Disneyland? What does it say about what we spend most of our time doing; the core work
that we are doing? And we have a fundamental problem in our society which is that work is
broken. We fundamentally have a work environment that’s not designed for human beings and
we need to think about how to change the nature of work pretty fundamentally to ensure that it’s
actually built around the needs of people.
And where my goal with Taproot was: let’s ensure every non-profit has access, my goal now,
which I will never achieve, which is my favorite kind, is to make all work feel like pro bono
work. How can we make it so that all work feels like pro bono work? It isn’t ever going to
happen, but I think it’s the goal in terms of how we start thinking and saying, “Why isn’t that
possible? Why is it that work can’t be that way?” And I am going to talk to you about section 2
of the book which s really around purpose at work. How do we understand what generates
purpose at work? How can we start thinking about how to make all work feel like pro bono
work? Are you guy’s game?
But, let me start with a more important question: What is the meaning of life? I figured here at
Microsoft you guys would have an answer.
>>: 42.
>> Aaron Hurst: 42? That’s the hitchhikers guide as we are going to go with?
>>: That’s the universe, right, life?
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah?
>>: Do hard, do hard, do good work, be happy and make others happy.
>> Aaron Hurst: Nice, people were willing to go with that?
Yeah?
>>: Become the all knowing master of time, light and dimension.
>> Aaron Hurst: I already did that one. It was all right, but like the next day I was kind of
bored. It just wasn’t a challenge anymore. Well, you guys are among some great people over
time. The caveman, back when I was a caveman we would stay up like late at night just staring
at the stars wondering about the meaning of life. Every religion is basically built on trying to
answer this question for folks. The philosophers spent much of their time trying to answer this.
In the modern day talk show hosts like Oprah Winfrey as well spent much of their time sort of
pondering and exploring this question. And I have absolutely no answer to this question.
So I just wanted to put that aside. I mean you already had some great answers in the audience,
but what I am going to share with you is what I think is just incredibly fascinating, which is in
the last 5 to 10 years new research, largely out of Michigan, Yale and Penn, has started to help us
understand something we have never understood before, which is what actually creates purpose
at work? This is like the equivalent for me of when we first figured out how to make the internet
work. It’s like we are in the early days and we haven’t yet figured out how to commercialize and
change everything, but we have now tapped into a science that enables us to radically change the
way we approach work, which is going to create tremendous opportunities economically and
socially. We are sort of at the cusp of this incredibly exciting time and I am going to share with
you this research that really changed my understanding of what actually work can be and what
matters when it comes to purpose at work.
But, before I do that I have to admit I was committing malpractice for about 12 years giving,
especially young folks, career advice that turned out to be completely wrong. And in looking at
the research it dawned on me and I realized in retrospect that I had been completely missing the
point and had been giving bad advice. So part of what I have had to do on this tour is really
share with people some of these myths that I found that I was propagating and that I find most
people hold about purpose of work that actually prevents them from being effective and finding
purpose for themselves, but also being effective managers and leaders.
The first is that purpose and cause are related or the same thing, right. Most people think and
they would come to me and say, “Ah, I really want more meaning in my work, I need more
purpose, like I need to find my cause. Why is it that everyone has found their cause like
education, puppies, kittens, whatever it is and I haven’t been able to find my cause?” And you
go onto Linkdin or Facebook and everyone has checked off all their causes, etc right, as if this is
a thing which actually brings meaning and purpose to our life.
But, this woman over here is from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Has anybody been to the
Upper East Side? So you probably know her. This is a typical Upper East Side woman who has
many, many causes in her life and pretty much no purpose. Does anybody know anybody who
has a lot of causes, but you would say no real purpose? Yeah, like they have checked all the
boxes on Facebook, but you are like, “Yep, still no purpose”, right. Similarly has anyone met
anyone who has tremendous purpose in their work, but if you said, “What’s their cause?” You
would be like, “I have no clue. I don’t think this person has a cause.” Has anyone met someone
who has purpose in their work without a cause?
I know lots and lots of people who have tremendous purpose in their work without any cause
associated with it. And I also know a lot of folks having worked for the non-profit sector who
work in the non-profit sector which is full of causes, and are miserable and have no purpose in
their work. In fact at the Taproot foundation we had many volunteers who were coming out of
non-profits because they weren’t getting purpose their going into other non-profits or we would
have business professional’s move into a non-profit thinking that was going to give them
purpose. Then they realized after a day it was just a job, right, purpose and cause is not the same
thing.
Yeah?
>>: Can you put into words what that looks like, somebody having purpose?
>> Aaron Hurst: Yes, I will, absolutely. I will get to that in a few minutes.
So purpose and cause is not the same thing. There is no scientific connection really between
these two things. The other two that I think are important here are that a lot of people believe
that purpose is a revelation. It’s like you read the Sunday Times magazine and you are going to
like stumble on an article and it’s going to like give you purpose or you are going to go to Africa
and you are going to see something and then like, whoa I found purpose, right. We think it’s like
a revelation, something that happens to us, something that we are waiting to connect with, like a
bolt of lightning that’s going to come down and like tell us what our purpose is in life, right.
And I shared this recently at Oxford in the UK to a bunch of graduate students and like all of a
sudden they just all looked depressed. And I was like, “Why, what’s up, time out, like what’s
the problem here?” And they were like, “Well we all realized that we kind of went to graduate
school because we thought we would have a revelation and figure out what our purpose is.” And
the faculty was like, “Sorry, yeah that’s not going to happen.” This is not the way that life
actually works. It’s what publicists and the media like to tell. It makes for a great Hollywood
movie, but purpose comes to us as a daily journey. It’s not something that comes to you like a
bolt of lightning.
And the third is the belief that purpose is a luxury and this is an especially popular myth among
affluent liberals to be honest. And I am not sure exactly why that is because whenever I talk to
someone who doesn’t have means they are like, “Of course you don’t need money to have
purpose, like they are not correlated at all.” But, we tend to have a belief that we have to like
work, we have to toil, we have to suffer, we have to do all these things to earn the right to have
purpose. Absolutely not, that’s like completely ridiculous. There is no need for a yacht to be
able to have purpose. You don’t even have to have a job to find purpose in what you are doing.
And there is no better example of this than Victor Frankl who was a slave in a concentration
camp in Nazi Germany and said he made it through life as slave in a concentration camp because
of purpose and meaning and the work he was doing and with the people he was working with.
So I figure that if a slave in a concentration camp can have purpose in their lives, I have yet to
find a work environment that’s worse than that. I am assuming it’s better here.
So purpose is not a luxury. This is a really important point because I think a lot of people think
they don’t deserve purpose yet. They think it’s like a privilege, that you have to like get to a
certain age or a certain point in your life where you are allowed to have purpose or like, “Oh, we
can only offer purpose and opportunities of purpose for people with means”. It’s really
important to move beyond that.
So these are the three myths that I have been propagating that I have now realized are myths and
are actually getting in the way of people of finding true purpose in their work and getting closer
to that goal of making all work feel like pro bono work. But, it left me with two sorts of
questions as I was looking at this research. One was these two women have this exact same job
and a cat, which is funny because I am totally allergic to cats and the cartoonist put it in and was
going to charge to take it out and I was like I will just leave it in. But, even the cat’s happier
here, right. They are doing the exact same job, this one is fully engaged, full of purpose and this
one is not, right. Like what’s going on here, what’s wrong? It doesn’t make any sense, right?
How do you explain that behavior? How can these two people have the same job and have a
different experience.
And this is Dr. Pickle, he works selling pickles, he makes pickles and sells pickles in my
neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. All he does is make pickles and sells pickles and he
smells like pickles. This guy has not had a date in decades, right. The guy should hate his job,
like god awful job, right, just playing with pickles all day. The dude loves his job and is full of
purpose, right. What’s wrong with him? And at this point I have to do a quick full disclosure;
the actual Dr. Pickle does not have a beard. The problem is that the cartoonist is from
Williamsburg, New York in Brooklyn and like they just have this total fixation on facial hair and
they put it on everything. So he ended up with a beard, but if you are even in Brooklyn looking
for him just picture that without the beard.
So what I saw when I started looking at the research, which this piece just blew my mind, and
again this is something that I have been working in for 12 years, there basically three ways that
people think about work. So it’s not about how you think about it today verses tomorrow, but in
general how you think about work throughout your life, from the start of your career to the end
of your career. If someone just asked you right now, “What is the reason we work?” It is like,
what is your immediate reaction to that question? Just think for a second, why is it that we
work?
What they found is that there are basically three categories of answers people give to this
question and they don’t really change much over time. The first is we work because the job, it’s
a necessary evil. We need to make money to pay the bills to be able to do the things outside of
work that we want to do. These people are what some people one at Linkdin called “coin
operated”. These are people who are fundamentally like, “We only work because we have to and
it’s because of the economic needs, right, that is the meaning of work.”
The second group is career and these folks see work fundamentally as part of their identity.
They work so that mommy and daddy are proud of them and that when they go back to their high
school reunion people don’t think they are a loser, right. They are fundamentally saying, “I work
because it’s part of who I am and how I express who I am to the world. It’s tied up in my
identity, that’s the primary goal of work.”
The third, which is the term the scientists use which I don’t love, but is calling. This is a
fundamental belief that we work because work adds value and we gain purpose through the
process of work itself. So it’s interesting, I mean people have these sorts of three buckets, sort of
a taxonomy of why we work. What was more interesting was that the people who are in calling
were shown to have higher life satisfaction, and higher work satisfaction and on most regards
better employees.
So I was always told as a CEO when I was being mentored was you a want to have mix of like
people here who are just punching the clock, getting the job done, getting it done. You want
people who are the climbers and you want people who are like the craftsman. But, it turns out
actually, based on the research that may not be the case. It may in fact be that we want our
people who are of this calling mindset and see work fundamentally as a value creation
mechanism.
But, here’s the challenge, in the US right now, based on the research I saw a third of the
workforce I job, a third is career and a third is calling. It almost evenly splits, a third, a third and
a third, which is interesting. But, more so they studied about a dozen professions and of those
dozen professions they found that the exact same pattern held true. A third of doctors see their
work fundamentally as a job. It’s a great steady paycheck, you are unlikely to get laid off, it’s
like a very steady way to make a living, so that you can go jet skiing.
Career, a third of doctors will be like, “Mommy and daddy will be so proud of me for being a
doctor. No one is going to call me loser at my high school reunion.” And a third says, “I am a
doctor because I fundamentally believe that doing this work adds value to the world and I get
purpose from the work itself.” And this is not to say that these people are bad doctors, right.
These people could all be great doctors, but you see this to be true of us doctors or as most
people would say, “Doctors are a job full of meaning and purpose”. Well yeah, for a third of
them, right.
The same thing is true of executive assistants. A third sees it as a job, a third a career and a third
a calling. As I went through each profession they saw almost an even divide in every career
among these three mindsets and they didn’t see it really changing between jobs. As you skipped
between different employers and roles it didn’t really change because it was tied to your
fundamental story about the role of work. So this really leads to a couple of really important
conclusions: one is purpose at work is a choice. You basically can’t say that it depends on the
profession, it doesn’t depend necessarily on the employer at the end of the day it’s a choice. You
can certainly have like jobs and opportunities that give you more purpose, but that ultimately this
is a choice and that we need to each accept that choice. And that’s sort of the first step in making
all work feel like pro bono work, is for all of us to accept that this is our responsibility, no some
external force.
The second one, which is for Kevin is that there is a tremendous, I think, philanthropic/social
change opportunity and it turns out that during your adolescence is when you have this mindset
created and it’s hard to shake. There is a tremendous opportunity here for changing the world
around how we can help set in people’s adolescence the mindset that’s going to serve them and
the workplace best throughout their lives. We tend to think about building the right skills and its
maybe as important ore more important that we ensure we are graduating 100 percent of high
school graduates with a calling mindset. How do we start doing that? It is a fascinating
opportunity.
So what is actually purpose? We asked earlier: how do we define like what generates purpose?
Purpose comes from these things I mentioned earlier. Relationships, we get purpose from
interacting from each other. You can get purpose by yourself; it’s much harder. We get purpose
by interacting with other people through the relationships in our lives. We get it through doing
something greater than ourselves. And this is where people often get confused with cause
because they say, “Oh, so a cause”. You are like, “No, it doesn’t have to be a cause and it’s not
like there is one cause out there for you.” I can be helping someone open a door. It can be
building a product that makes someone’s life just a little bit easier. It’s about doing something
that’s not just about you. It doesn’t have to be this romantic saving the world fully. You can do
your little piece of it, but it’s not about a cause and that personal growth and challenge. We get
purpose when we master new skills, try new things, lean into our fear. This generates purpose
for us, when we are learning new things, right.
And again this is the future of the workforce, I mean by the end of this decade the millennial
generation will be the majority of the workforce and these three things are the things you see
over and over again as the priorities of this generation. They want to have relationships at work
that are like second family, they want to make sure they are having a career of meaning and
impact and they are constantly wanting to learn and grow. And the old model that I was taught
as a kid was the sorts of model of learn, earn and then return. Was anyone sort of shared that
model?
So yeah, so the basic idea is you spend the first third of your life learning, stop that and no more
learning. Spend a third of your life just earning, just earn money, earn money, it doesn’t matter
that you just earn money, optimize earning. And then the last third you can join boards, give to
philanthropy, return, right. This model is broken in 6,000 different ways, right and the millennial
were smart enough to actually realize that and are saying they are no longer willing to wait until
60 to do the return, and also no willing to stop learning because they know that if they stop
learning in a year automatically they will be obsolete. They are saying, “I need to learn, earn and
return every single year if not every single day”. And it’s radically disrupting the workforce
because e employers don’t know what to do with this incredible desire to be doing such a
dynamic job as doing all three things.
So how do you bring purpose to work, either as an individual, a manager or a company? There
are really four things that have sort of seemed to be effective that we are exploring. And again
this is like the web back in 1996. And I mean we are at the sort of beginning of this and it’s
really fun because an idiot like me can actually say things that sound profound because it’s so
early. In 10 years I won’t have any chance of doing anything in this field. So if any of you are
similarly inclined it’s a great time to get into this business, even idiots can rule.
How to build purpose at work: so number one the first step is to take responsibility for purpose in
your own life and to build self awareness. What drives purpose for you? It’s not the same as the
person sitting next to you and until you understand what uniquely drives purpose for you it’s
going to be really hard for you to create the right path for yourself. And that’s why we build on
our site, imperative.com, a free diagnostic tool for the first time in about 15 minutes and it
enables you to determine what drives psychological purpose for you relative to other people. So
you can start looking for those opportunities and thinking about your life through that.
The second one is to craft work to your job. So we tend to buy clothes that tend to fit. Like this
sort of fits, but you can go to a tailor and actually have it tailored so it actually fits you, right.
And what we see happening with most jobs is that people take the job description and assume
that’s the final job. When in reality, in almost every single job, there is the opportunity without
even letting your manager know in most cases, to change your job 10 to 20 percent to optimize
purpose for yourself. And I am going to talk more about that.
The third is to connect personal purpose to organizational purpose. What tends to happen is that
in startups they are incredibly full of purpose because the relationships are intense because you
are working around the clock with small team, you are doing something greater than yourself
because every startup, no matter how stupid what they are doing is, believes they are changing
the world. And then finally you are learning and growing, because you are playing like 16
different roles, which when you get bigger you don’t do.
But, then what happens is that the organization grows, the nature of that changes and a lot of the
founders and CEOs think that the organizations purpose is enough to feed the whole
organization, but in reality that’s only like 10 or 20 percent of it. The purpose we get is through
the tribe that we work with closely and it’s around the craft of the work that we actually do. And
there is a need to align what generates purpose for the individual with the organization. And
that’s a lot of the work we are doing now with our platform. It’s around how do you help
individuals and companies find that alignment so that there can be a much richer community of
purpose?
And then forth celebrate and connect people around purpose. We tend to, in most companies,
celebrate the job mentality and the career mentality, but not the calling mentality. We celebrate
when we hit quarterly earnings, close a big deal and get a feature in the New York Times. We
don’t celebrate the things that are about making an impact. It’s really important to think about
not stopping the other two, but how do you as a culture celebrate calling, purpose? And then
how do we connect people around purpose? We are finding tremendous opportunity to start
creating infinity groups or resource groups that are around shared purpose files, not just around
the color of your skin or your gender. How do we actually start connecting people around what
generates purpose for them?
And we did an interesting experiment, because how many of you have taken like
StrengthsFinder/Meyers-Briggs? So it’s interesting about those in general, it’s like magnets,
opposite magnets. When I meet someone of the StrengthsFinder/Meyers-Briggs I tend to find
them really annoying. Has anyone had that experience when they meet someone of the exact
same type and you are like, “God that persons kind of annoying”. What’s interesting about
purpose is we did this experiment around connecting people who had shared purpose, there were
24 different types, and what we found was the opposite. It was like immediate friends, like an
immediate connection, it was so powerful.
We actually did an experiment internally where we asked members in my team to go in our
database, find someone who has a job that you think sucks as the same purpose type as you and
set up a call with them to talk to them about their job. People were like, “All right”, so they
looked up a job and they thought, “Oh god, I would never want that job”, same purpose type and
two things would happen: one is they would like immediately hit it off and be like immediate
friends and secondly they could come off saying, “Wow, that jobs kind of cool”. The problem is
we tend to get advice, or images of what a job is like, from people who don’t share the same kind
of purpose type and therefore don’t really what that job would be like and don’t have the right
approach to it. We get advice from our parents or colleagues, but they don’t have the same
purpose type and it totally skews our understanding of what’s successful.
So I want to talk a little bit, sort of this last piece, about this process of job crafting or tailoring
your clothes to fit. And the research up front centered on hospital orderlies. Does anybody
know anyone who is an orderly or someone who cleans hospital rooms? So this job sucks, like if
you want a job that sucks this is it, right, because you are literally cleaning up bodily fluids all
day long and doctors and nurses are so incredibly rude and mean to these people it’s ridiculous.
Like the next time you are in the hospital just watch how doctors and treat these folks like
furniture and don’t even acknowledge that there’s a human being in the room. These people are
literally cleaning up shit and being treated like shit, right and yet they still found that many of
them loved their jobs. So the researcher was like what the hell is wrong with these people?
They should hate their jobs, like what’s going on? So they went down and talked to these folks
and were like, “What’s wrong with you guys?”
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: And they were like, “What is it where you find so much meaning?” And they
said, “We think we are just as important as doctors and nurses” and the researchers probably like
giggled, right. They were like, “Well you are cleaning the room, like why do you think you are
so, like how dare you compare yourself to a doctor”. But, what they found was they had been
crafting their job to make themselves as important as doctors and nurses. So for example they
found many of them, and this is weird because they didn’t tell each other and no one knew they
were doing this, but many of them were actually doing it, they would sing, dance or tell jokes to
patients.
This was not part of, like most hospitals, when they interview orderlies aren’t like, “Please share
three jokes you will be telling to patients in the next three months”. Like it’s not part of the job
description, they don’t have to do a little tap dance recital. This is something that they started
doing to help care for the patients. They also found they provide a much more important bridge
to the family and friends of patients than doctors and nurses did and did much more too actually
take care of the psychological well being of patients in many cases than doctors or nurses. And
one story that was really moving was in a long-term care facility, where people actually stay for
weeks or months at a time the orderlies were moving art around because they wanted to make
sure patients got to see fresh art every day instead of just leaving the art up. None of these things
were part of their job description, but they tailored it to fit their needs and who they were to
optimize purpose.
And this is exactly what we are seeing now is possible with every job and what we are trying to
really build the technology around is: How do we create the ability to every quarter craft your
job and optimize it to tailor it to actually fit you to optimize around what generates purpose for
you, because if you can sing and dance in a hospital you can sing and dance at Microsoft. It may
not literally be singing and dancing, or it might be, but how do you everyday find the equivalent
for yourself to bring craftsmanship and caring into that work? It’s incredibly doable and it’s
really what we think is the future of: How do we reform work to really make it more human?
The key to this process is really three things. Task, so these people added singing and dancing
not part of the job. Relationships, they actually built relationships and reframed relationships
with the people. And perception, they no longer saw a patient as someone who makes a mess
they must clean up after, which would be my immediate perception, they changed the perception
to be, “These are people I am taking care of”. They re-crafted their job to add things that were
not part of the job description.
So one quick story about this, because I just want to make sure that you like see how easy this is
to do. I went looking for the place that was certain to have no purpose. So I went to mid town
Manhattan to like and investment banking company where everyone wears black suites. And I
was like there is no way in hell there is an ounce of purpose going on here right.
>>: [Inaudible]
>> Aaron Hurst: And I opened the door and like just waves of purpose started like coming at
me. It was like the most purposeful, insane culture and I met with the CEO and was like, “What
the hell is wrong with you, like what is going on here? You are not allowed to have purpose.
How did you get purpose here in mid town, investment banking, and black suite wearing
people?”
>>: [Inaudible]
>> Aaron Hurst: It’s a purpose suite, actually yeah, it’s lined with LSD inside and they just lick
it.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: They lick it every 20 minutes. No, what she did was very simple and I like to
share this because it’s a very human example that you don’t need technology, you don’t need
permission to do this, she is a CEO who just asked people, “How is your day?” How many of
you ask people, “How was your day?” And how many of you who say it actually wants to know
how someone’s day was verses are just like, “Hey, what’s up?” I was in the like what’s up
category, like it’s something you just say, like it’s something you just say like, “Hey, how was
your day? Great, talk to you later.” But, she would actually care and if someone said, “I had a
good day” she would actually be, “Oh, that’s not good enough, tell me one moment today that
made it a great day. What was one moment that made it a purposeful, good day?”
And over a couple of weeks or a month she would start to see patterns. And she would start to,
based on that, give them different projects, celebrate different things about them, connect them to
different people and started crafting their job around what gave them database purpose. So she
had basically done the diagnostic intuitively around what generated purpose for them and started
crafting their job. And yes, CEOs can do this, but so can individuals themselves just by writing
down every day the answer to that question. Like, what was the moment today that made it a
good day and looking for those opportunities, right? You can do it for your peers, you can do it
as a manager, and it’s not something that requires a CEO. This really speaks to me how to do it.
So again, we have seen everywhere from an orderly to an investment banker find purpose. It is
obviously incredibly possible right. So I fundamentally believe, I started off working in
technology in 1997 in the Bay Area, in Silicon Valley, and at the time the web was just sort of
really getting momentum and a lot of companies and what most companies did was say, “Okay,
this web is coming, the information economy, let’s hire a firm to build a website for us.” And
that was lovely, but another set of companies said, “Wow, the web is coming, this changes
everything, this isn’t just about throwing up a website and it fundamentally changes everything
about what we do.” Those are the company’s who have thrived over the last 15 to 20 years,
verses those who just thought all they had to do was get a website.
And the same thing we are seeing today is true. The companies who see the purpose economy
coming, there are sort of two categories, the ones who get their umbrellas and those that get out a
surf board and ride the wave. The ones that get out the umbrella are the ones who say, “Oh,
purpose economy, let’s make sure we have a foundation and a volunteer program”, check right,
verses those who say, “Holy moley, this changes everything” and fundamentally look at how
they are building purpose for their customers, how they are building purpose for their employees,
their shareholders and seeing it fundamentally as different. And we are seeing companies, new
companies and existing companies radically changing their approach at a fundamental DNA
level around purpose. This doesn’t mean that foundations and volunteerism aren’t important.
That would be like saying websites aren’t important, but that’s not the solution. The solution is:
how do we fundamentally bake into the DNA of every company this new economy that I believe
is coming?
So with that I wanted to share with you my contact information in case I can be of service and
open up for questions. Amy, how long do we have for questions?
>>: [Inaudible]
>> Aaron Hurst: Bring them on. Yeah, so love any questions, thoughts and if anybody has an
update on the game score that would be awesome too. Yeah?
>>: What’s the reaction when you share this to adolescents directly, like a bunch of teenagers or
have you done that yet?
>> Aaron Hurst: I haven’t, I showed it to my 6 year old and he was just bored.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: I haven’t tried adolescents. It’s actually not part of what I am focused on, but I
think I really would love a group of folks to take on that quest and figure out how to translate to
that audience and help make that happen. I will share one thing which is fascinating, this new
research that came out three or four months ago out of Michigan looked at what was the role of
parents in this. It was fascinating what they saw and this was a pretty limited study. It was only
looking at male/female, not single parents, sort of a more traditional definition of families, but
they found that mother’s matter a whole lot more than fathers, which at some level is no surprise.
But, if you think traditionally you tend to think of career that something that father’s are
responsible for in the household, not the mother. It went so far as that in the sample they had, of
the people who saw work solely as a job, that sort of far left category, not one of them had a
good relationship with their mother. So what I say is when you see someone who is just money
focused, all they care about is money, like instead of judging them I just give them a hug. I say,
“I am sorry your mom and you really didn’t get along well.”
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: So that’s my new intervention strategy. So the next time you come across
someone like that just give them a hug. Any other?
>>: The score is 5 nothing.
>> Aaron Hurst: 5 nothing, how much time is left?
>>: 33 minutes.
>> Aaron Hurst: Nice.
>>: And what did the female CEO say when people said, “I had a bad day today”?
>> Aaron Hurst: I don’t know the answer to that to be honest. She just shared the story around
the good day. I was going to make something up, but that’s probably better to just say I don’t
know.
Yeah?
>>: So what is the correlation between the people with three buckets verses their parent’s view
of their job.
>> Aaron Hurst: So what they found was that it was based on not what their parent’s actual
attitude was, but, what the child’s perception of what their attitude was.
>>: I am asking a more precise question to see if there is maybe a comparative to the belief
system.
>>: [Inaudible]
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, no absolutely. What they found was for you to be calling you have to
perceive both your mother and father to be calling in the way that they approach their work.
>>: What?
>> Aaron Hurst: If your mother does not demonstrate calling to you, you are almost statistically
not likely at all to end up with a calling mentality. And if the mother is and the father isn’t it
undermines that imprint and most likely shifts the person down that cycle. It’s fascinating and I
think it speaks to --. They looked at also things that really matter, like it’s really important that
we allow mother’s to bring their kids to work occasionally to model work. And what I have
found personally is that as a dad people think it’s awesome and cute when I bring my kids to
work. If my wife did the same thing they would be like, “Why can’t you get your kids under
control? Why are you bringing them to the office?” Like we don’t have the right standards
overall I think in terms of really enabling our kids to see us at work and see how much we love
what we do and showing them that calling approach.
Yeah?
>>: I feel like on any given day I will fit into any of those three things, right.
>> Aaron Hurst: Sure, yeah.
>>: So maybe can I take that diagnostic and figure out what’s better.
>> Aaron Hurst: That will get to what generates purpose for you. We all have days where it’s
just like, “Ah, I don’t to go to work today, but I have to because I need the money” or “I am
really proud and I can’t wait to tell my parents about the awesome thing I did at work today”.
These things all happen, I think it has to do with fundamentally like the story you care with you
about why we fundamentally work as the thing that seems to matter. We all have days that sort
of ebb and flow. What the diagnostic will answer is: What are the things that work that generate
purpose for you? What is the approach to work itself that will generate purpose for you?
Yeah, in the back?
>>: So I am kind of on this journey right now and I think one of the biggest challenges is when
you do something that you love, that you feel like you have purpose it’s hard to earn what you
think you would earn for that, so the economy part of it. Charging for things you love to do and
making people believe that you should be worth that amount. Can you talk to the economic side
of it?
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, well I think there are two different pieces to it. I think there is
economics in the sense that people are willing to take somewhat of a lower pay to be able to get
purpose, because it’s sort of part of the total awards of whether or not they are able to get that.
It’s about 15 percent that they see people are willing to shift around. You also see a lot of people
just optimize learning and relationships. Portfolio careers are becoming really popular where
people aren’t just working for just one employer. By the end of this decade 40 percent of the
workforce will be freelancers, which is to a large part, part of this overall desire to optimize
against that.
So I think it’s also a question of realizing how much money you actually need. I think a lot of
people --. I mean basically, in an average city, for a family of four I think you need like 75k a
year. But, we have all sort of built a lot of social constructs to need more money and actually the
research shows that the correlation to happiness, like after that point like almost doesn’t matter.
So I think part of it too is sort of recognizing like what do you need that money for? Is it for
recognition, security and try to define that well. So I think that’s a piece, but I think the thing
with turning into an economy there are going to be huge multi, multi-billion dollar companies,
and there already are, that are going to be servicing the needs of this economy. There are going
to be people creating, at every single vertical, new companies that will disrupt the status quo the
same way information economy companies have disrupted the industrial, right. I was just down
in Portland last night and a big part of what we are doing right now is working with mayors to
say, “Stop trying to be the next Silicon Valley”. I mean first of all, have you ever been down
there? It’s not really the place you want to be.
Secondly, it’s the old economy, it’s the economy that’s like in his hay day right now, but it won’t
be forever. And just like Detroit, where I went to school, the University of Michigan, used to be
the hub of the industrial economy. So going to mayor’s and civic leaders and saying, “Stop
trying to be, like Portland wants’ to o be the Silicon Forest, that like sounds weird and why do
you want to be that?” Let’s have everyone try to be Portland, let’s not try to run around and be
Silicon Valley. Let’s figure out how to make your city the hub of the new economy. So I think
there is going to be tremendous economic opportunity and we are already seeing that in a lot of
different verticals.
Yeah?
>>: So I too am on this journey.
>> Aaron Hurst: We are all on the journey.
>>: I just got back from vacation, so it’s always interesting to think about these things. I have
been struck with two things about our vacation.
>> Aaron Hurst: Where did you go?
>>: So we were in what used to be in Easter Bloc countries, Lafayette, Estonia.
>> Aaron Hurst: Ah, I love it up there.
>>: So one thing is we travel not by hotels, but we stayed in Airbnb and I think Airbnb is one of
these companies.
>> Aaron Hurst: Absolutely.
>>: And the relationships, they are micro relationships, we met the people once, we dropped of
their keys, sometimes they were just apartments that they had, sometimes we actually lived in
somebody’s house for a weekend. But, the micro relationship we shared with those people
verses a concierge and booking a room in a hotel, it’s not personal.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, that’s right.
>>: And that added a lot of meaning for our trip, but the other part was being in countries that are
basically 20, they were celebrating 20 to 25 years of freedom.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah.
>>: And they all appreciate that and they still remember it. I mean we were in Lithuania over the
weekend and it was a non-stop parade of every youth in the country marching and celebrating
their heritage.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah.
>>: And so it struck me that it’s a lot easier to have purpose when you are fighting something
and we don’t have to fight anything here. We have to define this for ourselves.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yep.
>>: But yet, when they are not fighting that anymore, it’s so new to them, that it’s all, it’s not a
challenge to find it. I found so many people just invigorated with what they were doing
regardless of what they were doing. And I still can’t understand why that is. I don’t think they
struggle; the youth there struggle with the sense of “what am I going to do with my life?”
>> Aaron Hurst: No I mean you see it, again going into that economic history; typically
economies have to go through each of these stages in their evolution. Like they go from that
agrarian economy, and many countries in the world are still agrarian, industrial, information and
then purpose. So just from an economic sort of output creation there’s a need to go through that
progression from an economy standpoint. People can have purpose in any environment at any
time. I think that it’s when it becomes economic where you are seeing that rise. And we too
would have all of our children I think marching to independence if we only had four kids. I
mean Lithuania is such a small country, so I think that’s cheating.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah?
>>: Any ideas or thoughts around what secondary education will do based on the change in the
purpose economy. So learn, earn and return was kind of built on you do high school, you go to
college, you get a job. So that model I would call college and support the model type.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah I mean I think there is an answer of what it should do and what it will do.
And I can sort of talk a little bit to both. I mean our current system is probably 50 percent
agrarian and 50 percent industrial. We haven’t yet created an information economy educational
system even. We still have summers off because that’s when you farm. We still fundamentally
look at a factory model for how we manage the classroom, right. This is just completely ass
backwards and we know it doesn’t work, right. So it’s an incredibly hard thing to change
because it’s so many infrastructures, so many vested interests in that, right. When you look at
what it should be you are looking at a couple of things: one education being something that’s not
seen as done at any given time, but building the infrastructure for us all to say we are in school
all the time.
And you are starting to see companies like General Assembly that are creating much more
powerful continuing ED that’s not seen as like continuing ED that’s not desirable and just for
people who can’t find work, but actually seen as like an ongoing part of how we are constantly
curious in retooling and I think that is a critical piece.
I think the second one is we now know that the best learning happens not in a classroom, but out
and about. I was lucky enough to go, and I write about this in the book, to a school in Ann Arbor
called Community High School where you could actually get credit for your job. You could get
credit if your grandpa wanted to teach you about World War 2 history. You could get credit for
actually teaching your peers a class. It was really understood that you learn in the community,
not just in a classroom and I think we will see more and more of that.
I think the third is building empathy as a skill and self awareness, which is not something right
now that schools work on, they actually do the opposite. They remove empathy and they remove
self awareness from what the experience is in terms of graduating folks with that. And the final
piece, home schooling is growing 7 times faster than public school enrollment right now, right.
And I am not advocating for home schooling, but home schooling is getting better outcomes than
classroom teaching on like most measures, right. And I think what that speaks to is the fact that
we need to remove these intermediaries and this sort of one too many model and look more at
why home schooling works, which is that it’s an intimate relationship with the teacher, which is
your parent, and it’s also a customized curriculum at the speed of that student.
Right now, like my daughter is in third grade, she has to be at third grade in math, English, art,
science, gym, right. But, people don’t evolve that way. She may be like a first grader in math, a
third grader in English and a fifth grader in science. We don’t just evolve and when a teacher
teachers something you have that one window and then it’s over. That’s not how we learn and
when you are home schooled you are actually building learning to that. And it’s sort of more
like Kahn Academy. So I think these are some of the things we need to adjust. I don’t think we
are going to be able to create a revolution. The infrastructure is too solidified, but I think what
we can do is look to make some of these changes to building more community, empathy,
customization, etc.
Yeah?
>>: So tying into what he said purpose, could this be reactionary to, I am thinking, climate
change and stuff like that?
>> Aaron Hurst: Yep.
>>: So purpose can instill this reaction verses being something that’s innate.
>> Aaron Hurst: I think it’s both. So in the research they show people who have a lot of chaos
in their life tend to emphasize and put more priority on finding purpose and creating a story that
helps make sense of the world. So this is true, mainly if you look at this in really poor
communities, why religion from my point of view is often so popular, right, because there is
incredible chaos. You see it in terms of the environment; you know incredible fear around all the
changes going on in the world, around the fact that the job market is incredibly unstable right,
although potentially getting a little bit better. I mean millennia’s are entering a very chaotic
environment. The average millennial is expecting a job to last two years verses gen X which is
five years or boomers which is seven years. This kind of chaos breeds a need to be able to
explain what their lives are about, what they are doing and what’s going on, because they are not
getting that from an employer they have had forever.
So there is a big part of this millennial generation that is driven by that need for some sort of
stability to come out of self awareness. That’s why you are seeing so much of this like quest for
self awareness. There’s so much interest in everything from yoga to self help with this
generation. So I think that is, it’s no doubt part of it. I think it’s one of, like I write about in the
book, several different macro trends that are affecting this, from the longevity to actually the fact
that we have only recently completely integrated women into the workforce and this is having a
huge impact on the workplace and on the economy overall. The economists were traditionally
were men and they said that work that’s done at home is not real work, right, which traditionally
was women’s work. They didn’t include it as an economic activity. Someone said that if you
added that to the GDP it would actually boost the GDP by 25 percent.
But, now that women are fully integrated into the workforce we are outsourcing those jobs and
now it’s starting to show up in the GDP. And what’s interesting the fastest growing job in the
US right now is not a software developer, it’s a home healthcare aid. It’s the people we hire to
take care of our parents because we no longer have time to do that. So there are these other
shifts that are fundamentally happening, they are moving this economy overall.
Yeah?
>>: So I am still working on the parallel between the digital economy and the purpose economy.
Much of your talk here, a subset of the book I am sure, was about finding purpose in whatever
economic environment you find yourself. So that’s different from, for instance, the difference
between the digital economy verses the --.
>> Aaron Hurst: That’s right.
>>: So --.
>> Aaron Hurst: It’s the same way, like if you think about like Microsoft you can argue, is
pretty much an information economy company, right.
>>: Uh huh.
>> Aaron Hurst: But, Bank of America maybe isn’t, but they still use information economy a lot
as part of how they operate, right.
>>: Right.
>> Aaron Hurst: So there is sort of like, the way I see it, is there will be companies that are like
almost entirely purpose economy companies, like Etsy, but you are also starting to see
companies that are basically saying, “Okay, we are in apparel, like working at the Gap, we are in
apparel, we are not a purpose economy organization overall, but just like we had to add IT to
make ourselves modern, we are having to basically figure out how to add purpose to what we are
doing.” So I think you see sort of a pure model, like Microsoft was pure in the information
economy and then you see every other company realizing they have to add it as part of their
platform.
>>: I see what you are saying.
>> Aaron Hurst: Does that make sense?
>>: Yeah.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah?
>>: Yeah, can we use [indiscernible] on the whole idea of freelancing? You said that you are
going to see like 40 percent of people working as freelancers.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, we are seeing an incredible rise in it. I mean Intuit did this study and I
think there is a bunch variable for it. I mean part of it’s not by choice right it’s that people are
having to pick up bits of work, but a lot of it’s actually people wanting that autonomy, wanting to
be able to choose their clients, being able to have diversity. I worked, when I was at Taproot, we
had a volunteer early on who was from HP, he had been there forever, he was a designer. He
was like, “I love my job, the people I work with, I get to have really fun tools, etc, but I am really
tired of designing in blue and grey.” He was like, “Everything I do at HP has to be in the same
colors.” And he did pro bono work and was like, “I want to add pink, and green and yellow and
be able to do more” and I think it’s easy to see that from a design standpoint, but I think in every
career it’s like whether you are working in the same code base, whether you are working in the
same HR policies you tend to like want to mix it up.
And I think also people want to have more control of their identity and not be just seen as an
employee of a company. And we are seeing this desire to do that. I think it also fits better with
the learn, earn and return model where people are saying, “Look, I want to be taking classes and
learning, I am going to want to be working some and I am going to want to be involved in the
community, etc” and it creates a flexibility for a lot of people to see how they can go about doing
all three of those. So many of my millennial friends like do not have a job and many of them
make more than the people I know who do have a job because they are basically doing this
portfolio and it’s stressful because they are constantly having to basically hustle for money, find
clients and do that work.
So it’s not like sort of all easy, but we are just seeing a huge increase in this and it’s radically
changing how we think about work. When you think about all the labor laws we have and all of
the systems we have, if we think about in 10 years it may be that many of the folks working at
Microsoft are actually not employees of Microsoft, right, which is already the case to probably to
some degree, but to see the acceleration of that. The whole idea of what is a team, what is a
community, how does this all work? And to me it goes to the extreme of like YouTube. I mean
YouTube at some level is like one of the largest volunteer organizations in the world. They have
got all these people creating content for the, like Time Warner would kill for that, right.
>>: [Inaudible]
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, exactly. So it’s sort of the whole idea of like what an employee is, what
is a customer, what is a freelancer and what is a volunteer? These things are all getting mashed
up and I think in the next five to ten years we are really going to be thinking differently about
what the relationships are. And I don’t have a crystal ball to see what exactly that’s going to
look like, only to say that we have got a fun time to bake a really cool pie.
Yeah?
>>: What I would say is that I think this purpose economy mentality transcends generations.
>> Aaron Hurst: Absolutely.
>>: You have talked about millennial, but I also think it’s true for gen X and for boomers. I will
give you an example. So in my job I lead citizenship and public affairs for the US. We just
hired a director in the central region and in four days we had 600 applicants, to the point where
recruiting said that, first of all we were astounded, but our recruiting team was too. And when I
look back on the candidates they spanned the generations. So my question for you is that if this
is true that we are all there, right? Whether it’s the baby boomer, millennial or gen X. Is there a
difference among those generations once they are all there?
>> Aaron Hurst: So I think there are a couple of things, but I think that every generation since
caveman probably cared about this. So it’s not that it’s like unique to millennial, you know I am
gen X, this is important to me. My dad just became a social entrepreneur at 65. I mean people
are exploring these things for different reasons at different times. There is a huge movement
around boomers to say, “Okay, I have got past that midlife point and beyond, I still know I am
going to have to work for another 30 years and I want this work to actually matter and mean
something and I want to learn and do this.”
So it’s a sort of motivation there. I think for gen X we are seeing a leadership opportunity to
help create this environment to make this happen. And for millennial I think the difference is,
one just the fundamental belief from the get go that learn, earn and return all happen at once,
whereas the previous generations did have more of a sense of, “Once I have earned my right,
then I will”. And I think also just this sort of much more dynamism around it in terms of the
networking that happens around it, the amount of stuff that’s done outside of work. I am seeing
a lot more of that kind of activity. It exists for sure with these other generations, but you just see
it like spiking. A lot of it is pretty superficial so far, because people don’t know how to get that
need met. But, not it’s absolutely through and through. I think the millennial generation though
is the one that’s going to force the workplace to change, whereas X and boomers are just excited
to have the opportunity and are like wanting it, but they are not like forcing the change the same
way millennia’s are.
Yeah?
>>: So how much of this will touch the lower economic class?
>> Aaron Hurst: Probably 22 percent, maybe 23.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: So this is, I sort of have a couple of different answers to this, and this book is
about like the science and it’s also about futurism. And I think there is some contradictions in
some understanding of how this will work, because it’s the future, it’s not the past. So from the
standpoint and having purpose in lives it affects everybody. And I would argue the people I
know who have the least means often have the most purpose in their lives because they are closer
to that story in Lithuania, where they are getting real purpose from the day to day of survival
with their family. I know when I was 22 I had more purpose in my work than I do now as a CEO
at 40, because I had more authentic relationships. I was actually coding, which was deeply
rewarding to code something and actually see something change verses now I just create
PowerPoint decks, talk to people and don’t really get the depth of relationships. So I think there
is some interesting sort of dynamics there.
But, as an economic force in terms of changing the workforce in terms of changing the
workforce and changing retail I think it’s similar to like the beginning of the information
economy where early on not everybody could afford a computer. There was a huge digital
divide and it’s only relatively recently where we are pretty much getting to the point where we
assume that everyone has a smart phone, everyone has access to a laptop, not every single
person, but the majority. And I think it’s a challenge about patience, like how long is it going to
take? I mean it took the information economy to get to decades to get to that point where
everyone had access and where it affected every job. And I think we are going to see a similar,
but shorter trajectory.
If you look at Roger Everett’s diffusion of innovations curve, do people remember that? It’s sort
of like this curve that goes from the innovator, early adopter, early majority, late majority,
laggards. You know the information economy; we are already in a late majority, right. Where
the late majority of folks are fully on board, there are still a few laggards out there who are like,
“Hell no, I am not using this stuff, its horrible”, but we have pretty much gotten all the way
through. I think with this purpose economy we are still in the innovators early adopters. That’s
why Whole Foods does so well and people are just like, “Oh it’s just an elitist thing”, but so were
the early computers because you just couldn’t afford them otherwise, right.
So Whole Foods is slowly actually changing the whole organic food market so that 10 years
from now you will be able to get low cost, organic and health food at any grocery store and that
would not have been possible if Whole Foods hadn’t developed that early part of the market. So
we tend to think of them as only for the rich, but they actually play a critical role in actually
changing the whole ecosystem around food.
Yeah?
>>: I have an online question from TH. She says, “Some say that data is the oil that fuels the
internet information economy. What would be the currency in a purpose economy?”
>> Aaron Hurst: Uh, purpose.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: Um, no, I think the currency is like choice around purpose, right. And those
employers that are able to create environments and support employees to really optimize purpose
are the ones that are going to be able to have access to the top talent. Those companies who
create products, services and experience that give the richer sort of purpose to their customers are
the ones that are going to be able to attract the best dollars, the biggest dollars, the biggest
margin for their product; it’s the special sauce.
And I think it’s starting to understand like: How does your product help build relationships?
How does it help someone do something greater than themselves? How does it help someone
grow? By building that into that experience and it has been fun working with retailers, you know
everyone from IKEA thinking about what is a purpose economy shopping mall look like, to
thinking about apparel, thinking about cars? How do you reach these industries? How do you
add that special sauce to differentiate and make your product better? It’s the same way other
companies had to bring information economy to existing products to make that special.
Yeah?
>>: What that probably looks like here is apps, because everybody is encouraged to build and
app and whatever your purpose in life can come through as an app that helps both the company
and the individual.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yeah, I mean apps are fun because it’s like something that requires much less
infrastructure typically and enables people to have that space. I think it would be interesting to
challenge like what is that here fully a company? And I think probably every single product you
have now you could think about: How is this product building relationships, enabling somebody
to do something greater than themselves and helping someone grow? I don’t think it has to be
like a separate product line; I think it may be a question of how do you integrate that more and
more and amplify where that already exists? I guarantee you are already doing that in a lot of
your products, it’s just a question of like putting it through that lenses and actually talking to
your customers about how they are using it and how they could use it towards these other goals
where it will have much deeper residence and loyalty with them.
>>: Well, every employee is encouraged to do an app here. That’s the, sorry I didn’t give you
background.
>> Aaron Hurst: Oh, okay, so it’s like bring your app to work day?
[Laughter]
>>: Yeah, find your purpose through an app as an employee of Microsoft.
>> Aaron Hurst: So how many of you have created an app?
>>: Six.
>> Aaron Hurst: Kevin did, I am curious to hear about that afterwards. No, I think that’s a really
important way to give someone space to create something and to have a breakthrough and it’s
like a really wonderful little way to test and pilot. So anyways, I think that’s great. Um and I
think it’s the start of like really thinking through everything.
Yeah, in the back?
>>: I think that’s the last question.
>> Aaron Hurst: Yep.
>>: The score is now 7 to 0.
[Laughter]
>> Aaron Hurst: Wow, my friends in Germany will be happy. Thank you guys, I have really
loved spending the afternoon with you guys.
[Clapping]