End Of the Purpose Era & IRL Meetups | #246
November 11th, 2023: Greetings from Barcelona. We all came down with colds arriving in the colder weather for a two-day stopover but are recovering and checking out the beach in Sitges today. I love Barcelona, especially how walkable the city is, including all the open plazas with kids running around.
Community Updates:
IRL Events: I’m sponsoring people in my community $100 to host their own “pathless friends” (need a better name maybe?!) meetups around the world. Some coming up over the next few weeks (open to readers)
Barcelona November 15th: Host by me! RSVP here
Amsterdam November 15th: Hosted by Anna and Gaura - RSVP here
Lisbon November 22nd: Hosted by Kelly Davis - RSVP here
New York December 6th: Hosted by Vinamrata - RSVP here
These are the first of hopefully many events. I think this should be a fun little experiment. If there are any companies that might want to sponsor some of these in the future, please reach out to Sri.
Pathless Path Breakdown with Nate Kadlac on November 16th: We’re doing a deep dive into his journey, which is quite impressive and very pathless. This one is only open to community members. You can learn more here or join by subscribing.
#1 End Of The Purpose Era?!
Take a look at this jar of mayonnaise, one of America’s most cherished brands of processed food:
What is the purpose of this white creamy stuff?
If you said something like “to put on salads and sandwiches” you would be siding with Mr. Terry Smith, an investor who happens to hold a decent chunk of shares of the company that owns Hellman’s, Unilever.
A reasonable take for a serous lookin fella.
But if you said something like “to fight against food waste” you would be agreeing with the former Unilever CEO, Mr. Alan Jope.
In 2023, it appears that Mr. Smith has won this battle, as Mr. Jope was fired after only 3.5 years (which for a CEO is actually below average, most last 5-6 years on average).
As Mr. Smith said in 2022:
“A company which feels it has to define the purpose of Hellmann’s mayonnaise has in our view clearly lost the plot. The Hellmann’s brand has existed since 1913, so we would guess that by now consumers have figured out its purpose”
Of course, it was easy for Mr. Smith to win this argument as Unilever had done quite poorly since 2021. I worked with Boards for more than two years in a Board consulting practice and it was interesting to see that they would pretty much overlook any sort of behavioral issues or management fads as long as stock goes up.
Unfortunately for Jope, the stock went down and trailed its major competitors over the past couple of years.
How Did We Get Here?
How did we end up in this weird version of capitalism in 2023 where a company is creating work to define the purpose of a 100+ year old mayonnaise brand?
And it wasn’t just ads. Here’s an installation they did at a global climate change meetup, hiring a famous architect in the process,
They also fed food that a grocery story threw out to this stadium of people:
And then told them about it after the fact. Here is one guy’s reaction:
Yes, wtf.
Scope creep?
I have many thoughts:
First off, all of this is fine. Companies try all sorts of things and some will work but some won’t work.
But this seems like it got a bit out of hand.
It’s just mayonnaise, right?
Right?
And also, I get organizations. We still live in an era of the performance review, where you actually need to show you did something.
I have a weird theory on this, that the increase in data and information combined with slowing organic growth in big companies led to an explosion of large-scale initiatives that could be endlessly mined for “proof” of performance at every level of organizations.
But also part of it is mimetic. If you’ve never worked in big companies it might be hard to believe that the main criteria for many new companies’ initiatives is the question. “are most other companies doing this?” It was crazy to see how many companies had copied Google OKRs in the 2010s without ever thinking about other aspects that may have made Google successful.
And finally, I think part of it is just status quo bias. What do marketing teams do? Market. And what do you do when you’re bored with doing the same damn thing over and over? Come up with crazy ideas.
(Fun aside: Have you ever seen a Fritos commercial? Probably not. I met the head of Frito strategy once and they said it’s a $1B brand without a marketing team.)
But perhaps we finally hit the top?
Is this the top?
The new CEO at Unilever, Hein Schumacher, is calling BS. He directly positioned himself against the old CEO (as is common) in the latest earnings call by saying they will stop “force-fitting” purpose across all brands. Hellman’s is back to being a cheap creamy white stuff that some people like.
And I think this is a good thing. Employees are sick of it. They want companies to just communicate more clearly. They are smart enough to spot bullshit. People want less of this:
Coca-Cola: “to refresh the world and make a difference”
KPMG: “to make a difference today while making the world a better place for future generations”
Starbucks: “As it has been from the beginning, our purpose goes far beyond profit. We believe in the pursuit of doing good.”
People want more earnestness and less bullshit.
In 2007, when I graduated, this was the extent of GE’s career page
Simple. Straightforward. Here’s our jobs.
But now every page promises the world. Meaningful work. Change the world. Impact across generations (really, KPMG?!). I went deep on this a couple of years ago:
Here’s the bottom line and my take: Purpose can’t be found in a job-shaped container. Or at least not over a 40-year career. The human spirit desires more. It has demands that don’t always align with a profit motive. Our desire to matter and to be useful are things that don’t go away and when companies use the P word to convince us to give up their gifts to chase silly goals, we lose track of what matters to us. It leads to burnout. Don’t glorify work, or really, don’t glorify jobs. Work can be sacred and meaningful but it’s often hard to arrive at. It often won’t feel purposeful until after you’ve found it. Which is to say, you can’t aim at purpose. Which is why people want it.
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‘Purpose can’t be found in a job-shaped container.’
Superb short read this Paul
I once had a client ask me to invent the ‘why’ of her business for a video she wanted to make. She’d read Simon Sinek and thought it was a marketing technique to have purpose.
I absolute love this piece. The whole sustainability piece was a big part of why I was drawn to Unilever some years ago to work, realized it was a whole facade and a strange way to brand a company that churns out millions of plastic bottles and tons of waste 😂 A job is a job, a business is a business - odd to frame it in an over idealistic way