| This week, why purpose—individual and corporate—is crucial to performance. Plus, the semiconductor industry’s tip-top performers, and Börje Ekholm, CEO of Ericsson, on keeping critical communications infrastructure up and running during the COVID-19 pandemic. |
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| September is about turning a corner. In normal times, children go back to school, and work ramps up again. This year, it feels right to wonder how long the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to disrupt our lives. For CEOs and other business leaders across the globe, there is a way to make sure your people can manage our collective uncertainties: engage their sense of purpose. |
| Setting priorities. It’s understandable that CEOs are worried about corporate survival right now, but understanding what drives your workforce toward the future is more important than you might think. During times of crisis, individual purpose can be a guidepost that helps people both face uncertainties and navigate them better, mitigating the damaging effects of long-term stress. Those who say they have a strong sense of purpose tend to be more resilient and recover more easily from negative events. |
| When people feel they are following their ‘North Star,’ they and their organizations benefit greatly. Those people tend to get more meaning from their roles and feel more committed, making them more likely to outperform their peers. Our research during the pandemic shows that those who say they are “living their purpose” at work report levels of well-being five times higher than those who say they aren’t. They are also four times more likely to report higher engagement levels. This is a win–win. |
| Make personal reflection a business priority. As a CEO, part of your job is to ensure that purpose—both individual and company—plays into hiring, matching individuals to jobs they will find most fulfilling, providing feedback, and offering incentives. Start by simply discussing these matters with your team openly and thoughtfully. By treating the discussion as the beginning of an ongoing conversation about what your employees want from work, you can help people better identify and articulate their purpose and even start finding ways to help them live it more fully at work. |
| Words and deeds. As the initial shock of the COVID-19 crisis fades, the hard work of reimagining and reforming your business for a postpandemic world begins. Remember that employees will be looking to see if their companies’ actions during the crisis matched their high-minded words beforehand—and basing their career plans on the answers. At companies where employees have excelled during the crisis, business leaders will want to find ways to recapture and sustain the sense of organizational energy, urgency, and speed—without the accompanying fear and stress. |
| The bottom line. The pandemic has been a cruel reminder for companies everywhere of how important it is to avoid taking healthy and motivated employees for granted. Forward-looking companies will be focusing on purpose as part of a broader effort to ensure that talent is given the primacy it deserves. |
| And don’t forget: this applies to the C-suite, too. The more purposeful, open, and empathetic the leader, the more likely that they can instill the trust necessary to encourage people to leave their comfort zones and explore how their purpose might be better met at work. |
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| INTERVIEW |
| ‘No one roams anymore’ |
| Börje Ekholm, president and CEO of telecom giant Ericsson, talks about keeping mobile infrastructure running, how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the transition to 5G, and the challenges to employees’ physical and mental health from remote work. “Almost all networks are optimized for the downlink—the ability to download files and stream video, for example, or to stream music—so typically you get much higher performance there,” he told McKinsey. “But I believe, going forward, you will care much more about the performance the other way, how fast you can upload. And you see that already today.” |
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| WHAT WE’RE READING |
| Tao Tan |
| Tao Tan, an associate partner in New York, focuses on crisis response, transformation, and private equity. He is a coauthor on a piece about how McKinsey’s influence model can help leaders change behaviors in response to the COVID-19 crisis. He spends his pandemic-bound weekends cooking (mostly Italian) and reading (mostly history). |
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| I am a history nerd through and through, and one of my casual interests is seeing how similar events in history repeat, or, as some would say, rhyme. I’m currently reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay, a Scottish journalist from the mid-19th century. It’s a tongue-in-cheek (and a bit sensationalistic) takedown of all the manias that swept the world up to that time, including alchemy, fortune telling, witchcraft, and—my personal favorite—financial bubbles. |
| MacKay chronicles three bubbles: Mississippi in France (where the word “millionaire” is said to have originated), South Seas in England (where Isaac Newton lost a fortune), and most infamously, tulips in Holland. Some of the stories make you shake your head: a particularly enterprising speculator raised £2,000—the equivalent of about $400,000 today—for “carrying-on an undertaking of great advantage but no-one to know what it is.” (And indeed, no one did find out what it was, as the speculator raised the money in one afternoon and promptly disappeared.) |
| Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, published in 1722, is likely based on his uncle’s diaries from the London plague of 1665. So many themes sound shockingly familiar, such as the quarantining of entire neighborhoods and not knowing what data to believe. (Doctors’ tallies? What if they contradict churchyard burials?) Of course, there was no end to opportunists peddling quack cures, including one particularly unsavory figure who drew large crowds by promising to “give advice to the poor for nothing”—his advice being to purchase his mysterious concoctions. Defoe also chronicles more mundane matters, like the question of who constitutes a critical vendor (butchers? bakers?) and the diarist’s scramble and annoyance at securing supplies to weather a lockdown. |
| Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements is a fascinating study of crowd psychology and how mass movements greased by fanaticism form across political, religious, and social spectra. It lays out the appeal of such movements in terms of self-sacrifice and unifying actions and how they grow, scale, and—more often than not—fizzle, only to crop up again later on. Published in 1951, the book looks to the horrific experiences of the Second World War but also further back to periods such as the Reformation. |
| Ultimately, what are the personalities and motives of people who begin mass movements and join them? Hoffer believes the appeal stems from escapism from the drudgery of everyday life to the promise of a revolutionary future with limitless possibilities. Ultimately, these movements can’t help but disappoint. |
| Andrew Phillips and J. C. Sharman’s Outsourcing Empire: How Company-States Made the Modern World is a look back at how the European expansion from the 17th to 20th centuries was aided by companies like the British and Dutch East India Companies, founded as profit-making entities but also endowed with powers akin to sovereign states. These hybrid entities have long served at the forefront of the emerging relationships among nation-states, when the risks of exploration, international trade, and eventually colonization was—at least initially—underwritten by private investors instead of governments. For example, at one point, the British East India Company’s army was twice the size of the actual British Army. Outsourcing Empire offers lessons for our own global economy, as protectionist and nationalist sentiments swirl. |
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| — Edited by Barbara Tierney |
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| BACKTALK |
| Have feedback or other ideas? We’d love to hear from you. |
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| Copyright © 2021 | McKinsey & Company, 3 World Trade Center, 175 Greenwich Street, New York, NY 10007 |
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