Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. It is my great pleasure to introduce Phil Preston. Phil helps leaders and teams navigate change with purpose so they can respond to the powerful forces impacting their organizations.
After leading high-performance teams in corporate roles, he went out on his own and spent spent time in Boston with Harvard leaders in the business purpose field. And since then, he has worked with more than 100 clients across all sectors as a speaker, a strategist, and facilitator. Phil is the author of Connecting Profit with Purpose, and he was recently featured in the CEO magazine, CPAs in the Black, and the AFR report on purpose in business.
Chocolate is his kryptonite, and running the tracks and trails where he lives in Bulleye, south of Sydney is the perfect remedy. Phil, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. Great. Wonderful to be here. And a little side note, I've just done something bad to my calf, so I was not doing so much running anymore. Oh dear. I need to cut down the chocolate intake to adjust. No, I think it's the middle-aged runner syndrome, isn't it? It's the injuries.
They mount up, yeah. Keep going with the chocolate though. So before we get into the interview, the first question I ask all my guests, Is there a role for love in business?
Well, there's a role for love in chocolate for starters. If I think from a personal perspective, and this stuck in my mind because someone said this many years ago and it just stayed with me, they said, you know, love is seeing things in others that you like about yourself, which I think is really nice, not just from a personal perspective, but I imagine you with your branding and marketing hat on perhaps would see that, you know in the way brands trying to attract and
connect with their customers people like us people like us yes we might be going there later on i suspect but when we think more generally about love in business i think it comes down to does your business genuinely care about its customers its employees and other people impacted by the business whether that's in the local community or across society as a whole so we we have to recognize that a business is not a person but it's a collaboration of people and resources.
So it all comes down to in that wonderful collaboration, is there genuine care and commitment, I think, from those people towards the people they serve? Yeah, right, and the purpose they serve, which is part and parcel of the same thing, isn't it? That's right, and how many are really clear on that purpose and try and deliver it? Yes, well, that's a conversation we have had many a time. That's right. So, yeah.
Now, we're going to talk a little bit about our collaboration and, you know, what we're collaborating to achieve, which is to connect people to purpose so that organizations can transform and succeed out of it. But before that, I want you to share with our listeners just some of the key milestones of your background that brought you to the purpose sector.
Yeah right i'm going to go on two threads here and i'll try and keep it succinct so the first one is the life and and work what you do in your life sort of thread and i came from a family that. Where hard work was admired and, you know, you'll do okay if you work hard. And my family did that. My parents did. And I did straight out of uni. I went straight into a corporate role. I didn't do the gap year or anything. I just went straight from uni in December into a job up in Sydney.
And I had an ambition to do something significant, although I had no idea what that was. But the end goal was sort of, well, you want to be comfortable in life. You want to have enough income. However, once I'd been doing that role and that career for more than 15 years, I realized that I really had no purpose. While you can think about money or you can think about being comfortable, you really need something to aim for that excites you and energizes you and gives you a reason to be.
To be honest, I fell in a little bit of a hole personally there and it was It was a tough period, but the end result was I left my job, not because I didn't like it so much, but just because it was time to do something else and take a bit of risk. So that's the personal work-life piece. Actually, before you go on, can I ask, was there a catalyst? Like was there something or was it just a gradual realisation?
It was fairly gradual, but I can pick out a couple of things And I'm not just doing this to sound smart or aware in this day and age, but I do remember being in this corporate role. We had an emerging leaders dinner, which I was invited to, and there was about 30 of us around this long boardroom table, like bizarre when you've got sort of 14 people on each side and the CEO at one end and the deputy CEO at the other.
And along this table, you know, individually, all these people were great, but it was a very sort of politically charged conversation. And I would say, look, my recollection is out of the 30 people around the table, it was either two or three were female as well. So it was, I guess, a manifestation of a big business that was still a good business. But, you know, sometimes the behaviors aren't quite what you want.
And there's a point in time where you go, well, you know, I wasn't, I was hitting about about 40 years old at that time. So I had some options to think about where do I go next. So I took that option and I embraced it. Yeah, great. Thanks for sharing that. So continue with what you were about to tell us. Yeah, well, that was part of leaping out into the unknown and becoming a freelancer. And you and I both have that shared history there as well.
And before I left my role, which was in investment management, I had been involved in some programs and some change management programs around getting our organization versed in this thing called ESG, which had only just arisen at the time. This was about 2006. So ESG was just becoming a thing. It was that point in time where... If someone saw an article in the AFR about ESG, they'd forward it on to everyone they knew because no one was really talking about it.
So I got involved in that. That was quite exciting trying to lead people into this change because for us, it wasn't, you must do this. It was saying, well, there's commercial opportunity here. If you're really good, if we're really good as an investment manager of understanding ESG risks and opportunities, then we're going to outperform our have peers.
So that was an underlying piece. And at the same time, I guess there was a bit of a narrative going around that CSR or corporate social responsibility is going to change the world. And I think most of us, although we sometimes said it, we knew it would never do that because it was just a very small part of corporate spending aimed at really just keeping stakeholders on side.
So with the climate issue becoming quite prominent at that point in time, it was just really frustrating to go, well, no, we're not going to solve this just by being better corporate citizens. And to layer on that, the ethical, socially responsible investing universe, which I think most people generally like, it was very binomial. It was like, here's a group of companies and it was either you're good or you're bad. And business ain't like that. You can go into any organization,
you can find great things going on. In some, you can find terrible things going on. You can find great people, you can find some not so good people. But you had You had things like the VW scandal where they'd manipulated data. And there's some great things about that company. It doesn't automatically go from everyone loving it to hating it overnight because this information came to light. So I was a bit frustrated all around.
And when I was invited to – or before I was invited to Boston to look into shared value and purpose in business, I was thinking there must be a better way. And when that came up, linking the two, it just electrified me. And I just was like, well, this is the thing, but what do I do with it next? So that's the end of it. When was that? So that was the article, right, the shared value article? Well, I first came across it in 2009 because they had done an article three
years before that called Strategy and Society. Okay.
Really good paper still, that one. And then in 2011 they put out –. It was called creating shared value which sort of really consolidated all of that and because not many people were writing or blogging about that at the time i managed to get noticed in australia and and i think i've mentioned this to you before that at the time i had about 40 followers on twitter and michael porter picked up one of my articles and retweeted it to 40 000, people so that was a nice little explosion in
recognition but since then i've applied those those principles to many different situations from corporate situations to even how do not-for-profits think about partnering with business through to projects for government where we've been bringing all three sectors together and how do you bring business to the table in a way that's not just oh yeah we're going to help some people out because we might be good people you know
how do you turn it into a an actual financial proposition for them to whether it's around employment or better products or something else, how do you actually make those links for them so they bring real resources to the challenges that we're all facing? Yeah, wow. Yeah. I'm just reflecting on that timeline, right, because it's so interesting that that article, I came across it in, it might have been 2012, someone shared it with me. And what did you think when you read it?
I was like, absolutely. It took me a while to get through it. it's quite a dense article it's pretty meaty yeah yeah yeah but you know what i took from it was just a game changer and i was already on that sort of trail of cause marketing at the time but and in a much more strategic sense where where i was seeing incredible partnerships just creating world-changing impact, but it was still the very traditional for-profit supporting non-profit.
And that shared value article completely reframed things for me. But what's interesting is, so you read that article and then you went to the Harvard course, was it? No, it was a special gathering. It was in, was it 2013? I think it was 2013 or 2014. I can't remember now, but there were 30 practitioners from around the world invited to Boston to try and consolidate what does this mean in terms of going out to companies and clients and putting this into action.
That's huge that you were selected as part of that. That's amazing. Well, I've got to say there weren't that many people on the radar. So I'd like to think I totally earned it, but also no, it was a matter of just being there at the right time, waving my hand in the right direction. Yeah, but also being across, not just being across that principle, but plunging yourself into it because it excited you so much.
And it's interesting, right? Right, because so you went down that route and it totally reframed things for me, but I continued with my agency, trying to do it through my agency with limited success. Yeah, well, I think this plays to why we're pre-empting, why we're working together now, is we were both electrified by the same idea, but we were coming at it from different perspectives. And I'd love to talk about that a little bit more later on.
But the other thing I wanted to mention was some people have been talking about this before Porter and Kramer did, but the fact that Porter was someone, like he was a Harvard guy, he was someone that industry looked up to, he's the father of competitive strategy. It was like that first really businessy person to put a stake in the sand and say, this is serious.
And unfortunately, I'd say a lot of people before him, because they were probably coming from more of an NGO perspective, weren't maybe given the respect they deserved when talking about these concepts. Yeah. So I'm going to ask you, because we're here talking about shared value, assuming that people know about it, but a lot of people don't understand what it is. And so I'm going to ask you to explain the short form, simple explanation of what it is.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And maybe if you could give an example or two to bring it to life. Yeah, I'll definitely give you one that really made sense to me. And I think that will help explain what shared value is as a concept. So let me show and then tell. And so the show is a very simple example. It was the Marriott Hotel Group in the US who was struggling to, at this point in time, and this was probably mid-oose. Is that how you say it now? The 2000s, mid-oose?
I've never heard that film. Oh, there's the, I don't know what it is now, the aughts or the ooze, I don't know. They were struggling with entry-level workers in their hotels because young people would come in, they'd do an entry-level role, but it was a buoyant economy and those young people would spiral up pretty quickly because they'd leap from job to job. Therefore, they had trouble with retention of workers.
So one of their lateral thinking ways around it was to go, oh, hang on, we've got this group of people over here, a lot of, for example, return Vietnam vet service people who are unemployed, who could potentially fulfill those roles.
And so what they did, and this might have been in conjunction with one of Gordon Kramer's consulting businesses, I can't remember, they devised a course to help train up people who wouldn't ordinarily be going for those jobs or be meeting the criteria for those jobs, but they found by doing a specialized training program, about 90% of them who came through would would be then able to transition into an entry-level role in the Marriott group.
And the impact of that was that instead of, I guess, the average sort of tenure of an employee being six months, it then became more like 18 months for that business. And when you think about, look, there's hard cost savings, there's direct hard cost savings there in terms of longevity of employees. And yes, there's an upfront cost of putting on that training program, but that cost is more than repaid.
So shared value is the idea. You can help address society's challenges, in this case, unemployed cohorts of maybe return Vietnam vets. And by making an investment in that issue, you can not only help society but also help your business at the same time. So they reduce costs in their business, maybe improve service levels as well, and that's the win. So it's a classic win-win piece, and it's very much an innovation piece
piece. And I think just to finish off on there, I think that concept really, we now lift up and we talk about purpose in business as being that classic win-win. Yeah. And the innovation piece, right? Because we are living at a time where innovation is desperately needed because there are so many challenges.
I find it so interesting that it is accepted that business brands products are there to deliver on people's needs and solve problems and yet many businesses don't seem to have made that transition to there are huge societal problems out there and rather than thinking that's just the role of business of government and NGO it's actually a huge opportunity what's that figure I always forget but there's a something trillion dollar opportunity figure linked to the Sustainable Development Goals.
Right. No, I'm not familiar with the figure. Yeah, I'll dig it out. I'll see if I can include it in the links. But it's a massive opportunity not just to, you know, do good and not expect to profit out of it but to find innovative ways to solve problems and as a result be profitable. That's what business is really all about and any organisation is about.
One of the challenges I found along the way is that with the advent of ESG, that's often equated with purpose in business, and they're not quite the same thing. Because when, you know, we're just talking about the Marriott Group, for example, it had an opportunity in the area of employee productivity, employee turnover. That was a very specific purpose-driven opportunity for them. But when we think about an ESG approach, that's being responsible across the board in all aspects of your business.
However, that does lead to a checklist approach and there are probably 20, 21 key ESG areas you'd want to be ticking off as a business, but not all of them will really correlate to a meaningful business opportunity. And so, yeah, it's sort of finding that where are the elements of that ESG universe that you can play, potentially play a really big game that creates that big win-win and at the same time be responsible across all those categories as well.
And it's about moving out of the compliance mindset, isn't it? Like seeing the opportunity rather than compliance. I've got to do this. Let's just get it done in as cost-efficient way as possible. And a little gripe to add in the world I came from, the investment world, I think that's not really acknowledged yet. It's very much a compliance view still in that world that as long as we're good ESG managers, will be right.
There's really only a couple of funds in Australia anyway, superannuation funds and globally that are at the forefront of that piece of saying, well, which of these businesses is really purpose-driven and going to create that quantum change and then drive profitability through delivering purpose rather than just make a bunch of money and give a little bit back through donations or give a little bit back through being responsible. Yeah, it's a very fraught area and there's still a long way to go.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that the ethical superannuation funds area is the fastest growing area, not just in super, but in financial services. It has been. Yeah, it definitely has been. And it was a really good point about leverage and scale here. So when I was exploring ESG back in whatever, the mid-oos, we had a decision as a firm to say, do we try and set up an ethical fund because we would have had the expertise to do it?
Or do we try and take these principles and embed them across our entire business? So, you know, the opportunity was an ethical fund, you might seed with $10 million. It'd take three years to get a track record board, it might go okay, it might not. Maybe if you go gangbusters, it'd be $100 million fund in three or five years' time. Versus, can you bring in a better understanding of purpose and environmental, social and governance risks and opportunities into $140 billion of assets?
And it's almost like, you know, you could maybe throw a mouse 20 meters or try to move an elephant one inch. You know, You know, they're sort of which one is more powerful. And some people will play on the mouse level and some will play at the elephant level. And I think you and I, I think we like shoving elephants. But we also like throwing the odd mouse too. I love that analogy. Okay, that's got to make it into the clips, right? Okay, good.
Shoving elephants, okay. I didn't realise that's what we did, but you're quite right. I think we do. and some elephants are more open to being moved, pushed. That's right. You want to go with the momentum. Okay. So I'm going to ask you to share how our collaboration came about because we're competitors, right? Yep. And I know I knew of you, you know, over the last few years, but we hadn't met until last year. So I'm going to ask you to take it away and share that story.
Yeah, I think, well, as you said, we knew of each other, but that's the case in this freelancing world that you know of a lot of people, but you don't always meet them. And I think when you don't know someone well, you probably second guess and make assumptions about what they're thinking. What assumptions did you make about me, Phil Preston? Oh, good, of course. But you just don't know. And I find that's a general life comment.
And one of my big failings is because I'm an introvert, I do often sit back and make assumptions rather than go out and confront and well not confront but i'm you know introverts don't go out to parties all the time and want to talk to everyone and so sometimes you can fall into that trap but i guess the you know our initial conversations when we're on the same course i think was last may may 2023 you know it was very surface level i've seen you doing
some stuff here blah blah you're doing that there and but i quickly figured and you probably did do that we both had this passion for putting purpose at the core of business because we wanted to shove elephants you know everything everything revolves around elephants now of course and to do that it's a pretty big exercise and one thing I learned early on is that you know you are dealing with all parts of the business as you know and through the work you've done it's not just
about I don't know the the strategy section it's not just about risk and compliance it's it's everyone one it's finance it's the ceo it's marketing so it takes a lot of skills to do this well and by joining up together i think we we bring that skill set and we can achieve a lot more together and we've already done some great assignments with clients that i know you know i came back from the last one saying wow you know they
love this piece which i couldn't i didn't even know about and i couldn't have delivered but we just rounded out a really great day for that that one client, because we put together our respective skill sets. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, when you're doing something like this, this kind of work, which is, how do I put it? It's, you know, it's not, you're not solving a problem that people understand they have. Yes.
You're having to educate them on the opportunity. It's opportunity-based as much as it does solve problems, but it's not the obvious solution that most of them are looking at to those problems. And it's hard work. It's lonely work. And a lot of it, it's long-term work as well. You share things. You turn up to an event. You speak. You meet people. You put content out there. and you know it's going to take time to bring people on the journey with you.
So doing it alone is a lonely job and to start to be able to work with someone who is like-minded but brings different perspectives to the opportunity is amazing. It's great. And one thing I want to highlight, like we agreed when we first started talking about collaboration, we were both really clear on one thing. And that was, if we're going to do, if we're going to collaborate, it can't just be to duplicate what we're doing individually.
We've got to be ambitious. We want to play a bigger game. And, you know, we, we did sort of pinpoint what area we wanted to tackle. And you and I haven't talked about this yet, but, but you made me think about it when you said, we both know that purpose served well, which unlocks the full value that it can offer, has to be threaded through all areas of business.
And prior to our collaboration, so through my consultancy, I've worked with all levels of business from small, medium enterprises to large corporate. But my sweet spot was medium-sized businesses because I realized that, you know, they were small enough to open up all of their areas of business, small and agile enough to do that, and, you know, big enough to make an impact. And I hadn't gone out targeting corporates because it was too hard.
Hard you know I did work with some corporates but I hadn't targeted them because it was too hard and now working with you you know that is exactly what we're doing we are supporting purpose-driven leaders who are in larger businesses and who are fighting the good fight yeah I felt also even though I've played it in the corporate space somewhat I felt like. There's been a bit of capture from the large consulting firms who aren't exactly flavor of the month right now.
And I think if you can bring genuine value to them and have a good relationship and good reputation, it's opening up a few more doors. And, yeah, it was interesting too. I think the number of – and this is where we put figures on it – we're not really going to be working with the firm that's going, no, I don't understand purpose.
I don't get it. I don't like the concept. where we're working with people who are not sold on it but they're open to the idea or they're already moving and it's how do we articulate this well and how do we go fast on our journey?
And I think the other realisation maybe we both have, I think through the way we do about, sorry, run our own businesses and collaborate in this area is that we are catalysts for change and we're guides and we're supporters encounters that I don't see myself as ever being someone who could hold down a corporate strategy role or a marketing role because that's just not me. But I think we know where we're good and we can help take people on that journey.
Absolutely. And so let's talk a little bit about the problems that we saw as we started exploring this and that we decided that's where we want to zero in on. Enjoying the podcast if you're looking for more inspiration head to our website thecauseeffects.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good, or buy the For Love and Money book. Every copy sold allows us to protect one square metre of rainforest. Help us save 10,000 square metres by 2025.
Yeah, it's interesting. I think, I mean, it's crazy right now. You talk to anyone in corporate life and it says, oh, I don't have time to even stop and have a cup of coffee. It's crazy this, it's crazy that, whether it's AI or it's supply chains or COVID or geopolitical problems.
There's so much change going on it's insane and I think purpose is the ideal way of I guess tackling that environment where people are they're not sure where to look so they're not focused they're exhausted how do you bring bring it back to something simple that we all understand it can gain clarity around and I think that's really powerful for organizations and so their Their leadership focus really is on the things that matter.
And, you know, I get distracted by shiny new objects, and everyone does, but you've really got to focus on, well, what's important here? So purpose is, it's not just that nice purpose statement that help people go, oh, yeah, we have a purpose. It's really, it permeates not only your DNA, it's reflected in your strategy, your operations, and the way you deal with your people. I'm sure you'd agree. I do agree.
I do agree. And, you know, for me, that aha moment was, you know, you've been doing this for a while, I've been doing this for a while, and I was focused on working with organizations and helping give them the strategies to embed the foundations of purpose in their brand and through their organizations.
Organizations but for me the real aha moment in our discussions came when we started talking about real people you know clients of ours who we call purpose-driven leaders you know they are champions for purpose within organizations who want to transform but perhaps don't really understand all of them, how huge that transformation can be. They start the journey with an idea of what it means, but perhaps they haven't grasped the whole opportunity.
But those purpose-driven leaders, when they grasp it, they are electrified by it. And they see like you and me they see that opportunity and they want to drive it through their organisations but. There's no blueprint for how to do this. You know, we can give them strategies and do workshops, but you can't go to university to understand how to do it.
You know, there are things like Harvard, different ways of approaching it, but there is no proven blueprint because people are on the front lines of implementing. And so, as we say, they are building the plane as they're flying it. Yeah, and they're courageous people. And I think we've been able to observe what they do and how they go about it and help make that accessible for a larger audience.
And I don't remember the article, we did an article a couple of months ago, which highlighted three purpose-driven leaders.
And in one case it was a head of sustainability who in the past a head of sustainability wouldn't have been I guess regarded at the high strategic level in the organization but today they are and this person's goal is not just to be good on sustainability stuff but it's to actually yes be good on sustainability but be good at bringing it into the organizational agenda and into the annual budgeting and planning process so that resources get put behind the right things.
Also, we mentioned Pamela in that article as well, someone you've worked with who has really taken it and run with it through her organization. And we can admire these people and they, as you said, they still feel a little bit alone even though they're leading and doing it well. The leaders around them might have good general leadership skills, but this is a slightly new area where they need often people reaching out for extra support.
Absolutely. And what we've observed is that they come from different roles. You know, some of them, so you mentioned Pamela, we're talking Pamela Bishop of Blooms the Chemist, who was a guest on this podcast. Oh, yes, that's right. Yeah. And she's amazing. She's amazing. And she was, when I first started working with her, she was Chief Marketing Officer.
Then she went on maternity leave, came back as COO, and she is now Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer and responsible for pushing the purpose agenda. There are other people who are heads of sustainability, as you've mentioned. There are others who are heads of marketing or HR. There are people who are at sort of mid-senior level who are pushing this agenda. It's not limited to one role. It's a mindset. It's a belief.
It's that shared narrative that we talk about people like us who believe that business can and should be a force for good, and they're trying to figure out how to do it. I don't think any of them have been given the purpose role exclusively, right? They have other priorities. So they're having to juggle exactly what you said before. They're having to juggle. There are so many priorities. They're trying to figure it out. They don't have time to go and find all of these insights.
But they know, they understand that it's not about just having a purpose statement and having a few strategies around it, their big challenge is to connect people to purpose. They've got to connect their leadership team to purpose. They've got to connect their board to purpose. They've got to connect their people on the front lines to purpose. They've got to connect everybody to purpose. And that's a huge transformational job.
And so talking about ambition, you know, together being more ambitious than we were individually, that's our sweet spot, isn't it? Yes. And one big learning, or certainly reinforced for me, might be learning, maybe not learning for you, but it's very difficult as a sole practitioner or consultant to run this sort of business when you don't just say, okay, I'm targeting chief financial officers at finance companies of this size.
You've got to figure out, But as you said, who is it within the company, if anyone, who's playing that role? But what we've learned is it comes down to people at the end of the day. It's a person, not a role. And sometimes companies have a couple of them or they have one or they have none because it's not on their radar yet. And we saw it, I guess, plugging or making people aware of the private dinner
events we've done for purpose-driven leaders. if we listed all the role titles there, at one stage we thought, oh, this will just be all heads of sustainability, but it wasn't at all. I think we had maybe one, but everyone else was in very different roles. And they really spark off each other because they get that not only transferability of experience, but there's that extra dimension being in different roles as well.
Yeah. Yeah, so let's talk about the dinner events a little bit because that, I guess our products have sort of started evolving organically and I'm not going to open the door to doing a product plug here. I've already done it. Anyway, I'll be there. Because, yeah, we've got a few, but the dinner event started off as one thing, but have led to something else, haven't they?
Well, what do you mean led to something else? Well, I think we initially started them as thinking, okay, we want to give a select group of people who we know, so it was by invitation only, give them a taste of what they could expect to experience on the mastermind solution that we were looking at. That's how it started. And it does do that. But from the feedback we had from the guests at the dinner, it's kind of become this thing that's going to take on a life of its own, isn't it?
Yeah, I think so. And that's about playing a bigger game. And I think when we put up this idea of a private dinner for purpose-driven leaders, we didn't know whether we'd get one taker or 20. We got just the right number in the end to make it a great opening event.
And so that I think took it from our perspective from okay this works to wow how do we sort of start driving this home and and I think I've also realized that you can only do so many events and dinners as well you you know we'll have people who've said they want to come to the next one which is awesome but if you really want to create change and do something meaningful you know from our perspective
we want to give people that program offering where they work on something really seriously together. And that's our goal for 2025 is to get that program up and running, which you mentioned is a mastermind or peer support program without curation. So that's exciting. That's one of our big goals. And yeah, I'm super excited about that one because I think there's so much opportunity and it goes to the idea that proximity is power.
You know, who you surround yourself with is what can actually lift you up and make you stronger. And going back to those purpose-driven leaders we talked about, so often they're working alone. You know, they might have their teams around them, but in pursuing that purpose agenda, it's often a solo effort.
And so to give them the opportunity to be surrounded with like-minded people in different industries and learn from their experience so that they can perhaps avoid some of the challenges or take advantage of some of the opportunities rather than stumbling around just trying to figure it out themselves. I think it's a massive opportunity. And plus, you know, bringing in guest speakers of those pioneering organizations who are even further down the track.
Yeah, I'm super, super excited about what we can achieve through that and how we, by supporting these people, what they can achieve. And yeah, looking at ways of supporting them. And they're the heroes, you know, like you said in the beginning, they're brave. They're courageous and those are the people I want to put my time into supporting. Yeah, definitely. And it's all about leverage from an individual perspective. How do I make the most impact?
And I think we both see it's not the biggest organization, but not the smallest. There's some large organizations out there that can really make a big difference.
And just to throw in a statistic overall which I love is that 75 to 80 percent of our GDP comes from is generated by private enterprise so if we think about taking on any environmental or social or climate challenge whatever it is we're going to need the private sector not just to come along but lead in that because they can mobilize resources really quickly and and I think it's one of those cases where it's a bit of a flip state it might you know organizations will go through these machinations
for a while talk about it get their heads around it maybe have a few little setbacks but once it all really grabs and works well they can go forward really quickly yeah and and one thing we we haven't talked about too much and i think is a really important part of this is unlocking the potential of people like the power of people so when we talk about connecting people to purpose.
If an organization has a purpose statement and let's hypothesize maybe their leadership team aligned with it, across it, but if their people are not fully connected to it. Then huge, so much opportunity is left on the table, isn't it? And I think a lot of waste, organisational time and effort, waste comes out of that because it's less about focusing around the common goal because that common goal doesn't feel tangible to anyone.
And look, let's face it, it is hard to walk into an office or into your home office every day and go, yeah, I'm here to deliver my organisation's purpose, but we've got to break it down into bite-sized pieces for everyone in the organization. And funnily enough, it's a purpose statement probably doesn't need and in many cases doesn't resonate with customers.
It's all about mobilizing people, the workforce around delivering it because the marketing message or the product message might be very different to the purpose statement. Yeah, see, I challenge you there, Phil. You would expect that, wouldn't you, with my marketing background? In the ideal world, they'll all line up. It's got to start internally. I 100% agree with you on that, that it's got to start internally.
But I do think when it is connected to and served by its people internally, and it's driving innovation, and it's driving impact, and it's driving profitability, then I think the customer side absolutely comes on board. And yes, it may be expressed in different ways or it may not be. It may be consistent. But for me, it's, you know, the real mark of a true purpose-driven organization is where all stakeholders are on board, you know, and swimming in the same direction.
But yeah, I agree with you that it's got to start with your own people, because if it doesn't, it's just going to fracture. And to go with that, helping organizations wade through this vision versus mission versus purpose statement versus values and how do they all come together. And that's one of life's little mysteries that we help solve. And again, it will come down often to the maturity scale.
You know, if we had a purpose maturity scale, the approach might be a little different depending on where the organization is on that scale. We do. Don't you remember I shared with you the purpose maturity curve? Okay. Which I'm going to have to dust off and bring out again. You'll have to show me again. Well, I've got my own ones lying in the back room somewhere. Yeah, there you go. We'll compare those. We'll have to have a maturity scale working session. Absolutely. Absolutely.
I've really enjoyed this discussion. I hope our listeners have as well. Well, I'm going to ask you, actually, before I ask you about Bill's dream, what would you hope that a listener might take out of this and what action would you invite people to take? Well, what I hope listeners would take out of this or viewers would take out of this is purpose in business is a real thing that is a commercial proposition.
It's not, oh, that's nice, we do this, we talk about this on our offsite every year and then we talk about it, we put it, we shelve it until the following year. We're particularly in this environment now, it is almost a no-brainer.
If you want to make your life simpler and get your people more focused around things that matter for not just them but their organisation and their stakeholders and their customers as a whole, it's a no-brainer in my world but our challenge is to make it everyone's world and to do that, it's to have conversations at whatever level is appropriate.
So, you know, we both have seen organizations where it's someone leading the conversation and no one else is really on board yet, which is different to one that's been having the conversation for a while and now need to start making some concrete steps. So I think wherever you're at in your journey, just come and talk about it with us. It doesn't have to be a consulting gig or anything like that.
We just love to talk about this to find out where people are, where they want to get to, and I'm more than happy to provide some guidance on that journey. And I think it's just about giving the leadership group the confidence to keep going forward and they'll gain that confidence by having the right tools and the right knowledge on board. Beautifully put. Phil, thank you for joining us on this episode.
And I'm going to ask you to close the episode with your dream, your vision for 2030, which is not far away. I mean, God, it's five and a bit years, right? But in your best dreams, in your happiest dreams, in your most ambitious dreams, what could it look like? Well, one, it's about exploding our impact, which means working with more purpose-driven leaders and organizations and then tracking them on their journey to see the results that spins off, and that will be a mark of success.
And then looking forward through that, I mean, we'd want to be – or I'd want to be authoring and documenting parts of that journey and telling those stories. And you're a big fan of storytelling, so I know that sits well with you.
However I think the other piece around this is I don't know if I mean we use the word legacy a lot I don't know if it's a legacy piece or not but it's creating the next generation not just of purpose-driven leaders but the next generation of of capitalists like us to be taking that journey as well and and really scaling up on on many different levels so yeah I I think that and really building on the relationships and enjoying those relationships
that we do form with people They're great people along the way. Let's have more of it. Music. Thanks for listening to this episode of the For Love and Money podcast. If you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement, visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au. And remember, doing good is good for business. So if you're not doing good, then what are you doing? Thank you.