#1105 Ranjay Gulati On The Secret To Building Multi-Billion Dollar Companies

Ranjay Gulati is a Professor at Harvard Business School, author of the book "Deep Purpose" and host of the podcast "Deep Purpose". In this conversation, we discuss everything around finding purpose for your business. A company's shared purpose leads to creating resilient organizations, recruiting the best talent, and amassing larger corporate profits. ======================= Valour (formerly DeFi Technologies) represents what’s next in the digital economy -- providing simplified, trusted access to crypto, decentralized finance and Web 3.0 investment opportunities. Institutions and investors can gain diversified, secure, compliant, and easily tradable access to a diversified set of industry-leading equity products and protocols, through a single stock purchase on a regulated exchange. Currently listed on U. S. (OTC: DEFTF) and Canadian (NEO:DEFI) exchanges. For more information or to subscribe to receive company updates and financial information, visit our website at valour.com ======================= The number one name in NFT domains and the world’s most powerful wallet are teaming up to bring something new to the crypto and Web3 world: Either sign up for a free blockchain.wallet or visit Unstoppabledomains.com to buy your domain today. ======================= Compass Mining is the world's first online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware and hosting. Compass was founded with the goal of making it easy for everyone to mine bitcoin. Visit https://compassmining.io/ to start mining bitcoin today! ======================= Exodus is leading the world out of the traditional financial system by building beautiful and user-friendly blockchain products. With its focus on design and user experience, Exodus has become one of the most popular and loved cryptocurrency apps. It’s supported on both desktop and mobile, allowing you to sync your wallet across multiple devices so you can have access to your funds anywhere. You can instantly exchange around 100 different cryptocurrencies straight from your wallet. Interactive charts let you view an asset’s price history and your portfolio’s performance over time. And maybe the best part, Exodus is integrated with the Trezor hardware wallet - making advanced security easy for everyone. Visit exodus.com/pomp for your free download or search Exodus on the App Store or Playstore. ======================= If you’re trying to grow and preserve your crypto-wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. So, ready to take your investments to the next level? Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches. Open an Alto CryptoIRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to https://altoira.com/pomp ======================= Amberdata provides the critical data infrastructure enabling financial institutions to participate in the digital asset class. We deliver comprehensive data and insights into blockchain networks, crypto markets, and decentralized finance. Download our Digital Asset Data Guide at https://www.amberdata.io/pomp =======================

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Ranjay Gulati is a professor at Harvard Business School. He's the author of a book called Deep Purpose and also a host of the podcast, Deep Purpose as well. In this conversation, we unpack a lot of his research, including what makes resilient organizations, how leadership teams can recruit the best talent, why purpose is real and leads to corporate profits, and how he was converted from a skeptic to a true believer in this idea of purpose and its importance in the corporate environment. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ranjay,

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  and I hope you guys enjoy it as well. After you get done listening to this episode, let me know on Twitter, what'd you like? What did you not like? What did you agree with? And what did you disagree with? That conversation is really important for me. It's how I learned, and I hope it's how you learn as well. All right, let's get into this episode with Ranjay. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I'm very excited about this conversation. I thought a great place to start is this idea of purpose. When most people hear that, you'll get some portion of the population's gonna cringe up. They're gonna say, oh, purpose, that's not for me. That's not my thing. I want to talk about profit, so I want to talk about something else. Talk a little bit about your evaluation of the state of purpose in kind of the public discourse before you actually began to interview people, write the book, and eventually start the podcast.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  So, look, honestly, I was a purpose skeptic. If you told me five years ago, Gulati, I have a crystal ball, and you, my friend, are gonna write a book about purpose, I would have said, you're crazy. Not a chance, zero. Not a chance I want to... And yet, here I am. And I think it's important to understand how I came to that realization, you know? Because for me also, I was confused. People said, purpose, on the one side, people were saying, a purpose of business is shareholder value. And the other was saying, no, purpose is anything but shareholder value. Some said it's left-wing, some said it's right-wing. It was just confusion around, purpose is a tax on business. First of all, purpose is a very individual idea. Right?

• 2:44Speaker 02

  It starts at the individual level. And there's thousands of definitions, for thousands of people have contemplated the purpose of human life. And I think one of the best definitions I liked was William Damon, a Stanford psychologist, who says, "Purpose is a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self." So, meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self. And I think it's important to understand that, that all of us, deep down inside, some of us haven't thought about it, we're really too busy saying, I don't have time for this, and I'm gonna wait for a while till I contemplate my purpose in life. But I think it's never too early to think about your purpose. And it's about really saying, what do I want to do that gives me meaning?

• 3:28Speaker 02

  And I believe all of us, deep down somewhere, want to do something that is consequential beyond the self. Whatever that self, beyond the self, might be. It could be your family, it could be your religious community, it could be your church, it could be your neighborhood, it could be anything. And that's what gives us purpose. And I came to realize that purpose can really unlock human beings.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  But purpose can also unlock organizations. And that to me was the starting point into my journey, that purpose is good for us. It's good for us individually, it's good for us in organizations.

• 4:06Anthony Pompliano?

  What's fascinating about this is that as I'm hearing you kind of describe your journey and some of the things that you began to understand, everything from military leadership schools to sports teams, to even startups, right, where there is some big challenge that is laid out in front of them, a lot of times people will talk about the idea of leadership being the ability to bring together a group of strangers and get them to accomplish something that they might not have otherwise accomplished. And really, it sounds like your description of purpose and my understanding and prior descriptions of leadership, they go hand in hand, right? The good leader lays out a strong purpose and then the group, the team, the company, whatever, rallies around whatever that purpose is, and that's kind of what creates a special

• 4:51Anthony Pompliano?

  situation. Is that a fair way to kind of categorize this?

• 4:57Speaker 02

  That's a great way to characterize it. I think that is interesting. One of the coaches I interviewed was Pete Carroll from the Seattle Seahawks. And Pete said the following to me. He said, "There's magic when organizations can inspire people to align their own personal passion, self-understanding, and desire for growth with a common organizational ambition." It's about getting people to connect their own personal ambition and beliefs with some collective organizational beliefs. If you look at the Marine Corps, another organization I've been looking at, Semper Fidens. You know, I buy into some collective vision of who we are. And I think it's important to understand where this comes from and why it energizes employees.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  I'm going to talk about customers and communities in a little bit, but why does it energize employees? I think it's important to understand that, you know, if you look at human motivation, what, how do we show up to work? The basic level starting point is work is a job, right? I do it for money. It's a transaction. You go a little higher than that and then there was this work of what was called job satisfaction. I do work where I feel satisfied, when I feel I'm being rewarded fairly, it's safe, no excess bureaucracy, I get the tools and resources I need. And there's pay for performance, reinforcement. If I work hard, I get paid well, right? So that's job satisfaction.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  Then along come some researchers in the seventies who say, no, no, no, there's a higher level at which you can get people to show up, and that's engagement. And engagement people are when they feel part of a team, they have some autonomy, they get to exercise some discretion, it's a positive culture. And suddenly what became important was job design to make work interesting and interesting so that people feel engaged. And we started measuring engagement. There's a third level people started talking about in the last five, seven years, which is inspired, inspiration. I get meaning out of what I do. What I do, I believe, makes a difference in some way in the world around me. And you can see that in startups, as you said earlier.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  You can see that in large companies, as you can see earlier. And by this way, when I feel that what I do makes a difference, I show up to work inspired. And by the way, inspired workers are more than twice as productive as satisfied workers. So how do I create a context in which people are inspired to show up to work?

• 7:31Anthony Pompliano?

  It it's a situation where startups, I think, are such a great example because by definition, a startup is nothing that is trying to become something. And the odds are stacked against it. And usually, it's not just can we figure out what's in front of us, but it's also we have to compete with somebody who has more resources, more time in the market, kind of all these seeming advantages. Now, for those people who spend a lot of time in the startup world, they see some of those things maybe are disadvantaged. And they try to use them against them. But you've looked at sports, you've looked at large companies, you've looked at founders, investors. You've talked to so many different people around this.

• 8:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Are there a couple of key components to every mission or purpose that you see being repeated over and over again across these organizations that really kind of resonates? And allows for leaders to say to their employees, their team or their colleagues, hey, this is where we're going and gets them excited and inspired like you're mentioning?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  It's a great question. The first thing I want to share with you, a precursor to this book that I wrote called Deep Purpose was an article I wrote in Harvard Business Review called The Soul of a Startup. And I went and interviewed a whole bunch of startup CEOs. I have to admit, I had a biased sample. I looked at the ones that actually make it, not the ones that fail. And you know, what I found was interesting was everyone thinks a startup is based on a great idea, a big idea. And yes, almost all of them, especially when successful, have a big idea. But I found that behind the idea was a grand idea.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  We want to change the way this thing works. We want to change the market, exactly what you were saying earlier. It's not, the ambition is defined not just by an idea. I have a new widget that nobody has how to make. No, I'm going to change the way this entire market operates and the way customers buy, sell, transact. You know, that's Airbnb, that's Uber. I'm going to change the marketplace completely. So I came to realize that there was that piece of it, that the successful startups actually understand this. Now let's get to the definition of purpose. I think you're, that was a great question you asked. So let me try to articulate that for you. I want to first start, purpose is not a purpose statement. It's not like some mission statement only, oh yeah, it's the mission statement.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Purpose is bigger than a mission statement because it's the, the mission statement is just a simple, a set of words to capture the intent behind the purpose itself. It's just a verbalization. What purpose is, is kind of understanding for yourself. It's a unifying idea of the problems you want to solve in the world. Profitably solved, I should clarify. So you're asking yourself, what value are we going to create? Who are we going to create it for? Customers, employees, shareholders, community, whatever? And how are you going to do it?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Now, if you think about this, behind this simple idea, it's about business, folks. Purpose is not about, I want to save the planet only and I don't care about shareholders. Purpose is about making a viable, successful business in the long term. So, purpose has ambition, goals. But purpose also has in it duties, responsibilities. That, you know, we are a responsible entity. We care about our customers. We really care about our employees. We really care about the communities where we operate. Because as a long-term business, any business that is trying to be successful, not just in the short term, but also long-term, cares about these different stakeholders. So, we're not here to save the planet. We're here to build a profitable venture.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  But as a long-term venture, we have to think about all the different stakeholders that impact our long-term success.

• 11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  What you're really hitting on here, and I think it's so unique. I've talked to a lot of founders, and these founders are sometimes early-stage. Some of them are series C, D, E, and kind of getting ready for public markets. But in those conversations, the thing that I believe most of them have learned, and I'm paraphrasing a lot of different conversations into kind of one key takeaway, is that if you don't have a crystal-clear purpose or mission that you can clearly articulate to your employees, it creates a scenario where there's a vacuum of purpose. And then what happens is, some of the employees want this to be the purpose, or they believe this is why they're here, or other employees believe this, or whatever. And so, I've seen them all do it different ways.

• 12:11Anthony Pompliano?

  But what it appears they all have done is, as there's been noise about a bunch of different purposes, the really good ones have said, no, we have one singular, crystal-clear purpose, and it is X. And each company's different for why they want to be there, or whatever. And what it's done is, it's almost served as a great recruiting mechanism. Because people who care about X, they show up and say, I want to work at your company. It serves as a great filtering mechanism because it seems like the people who aren't interested in X and are actually interested in Y or Z, they go find a company that's doing that. But then also it goes back to this inspiration that you mentioned earlier is now it's very easy for people to sit there and say, hey, if you're here at this company, you must be

• 12:52Anthony Pompliano?

  into X, I'm into X, let's go all work towards this together. And so it's not just like purpose as like a kind of a flimsy thing that kind of floats in the air. To your point, it's like, no, it's a super crystal clear thing that like we really, really mean. And it almost makes the organization better because it gets better people, it weeds out the people who aren't there for the purpose. And then everyone's inspired to kind of work towards it. And so I see this in practice, and it sounds like that's exactly what you're laying out here, is that you have data from these conversations and interviews that's highlighting the organizations are better once you have that crystal clear purpose.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  So extremely well said, and your intuition is spot on. So for the book, I interviewed companies, small companies that used to be small, at least Etsy, a company called Livongo that was acquired by Teladoc after it went public. I looked at Gotham Green, which makes salads and herbs that are sold in Whole Foods and grocery stores. But I'll tell you where it really came through to me was after the book, I was like, okay, now what? And then I said, okay, I've got to go find some other leaders that are really living some of these ideas that I tried to articulate in the book. And I just finished a podcast, and one of the people I interviewed was David Ballez, the founder of New Bank. It's the largest

• 14:10Speaker 02

  digital bank in the world, starting out of Latin America. Another one, and he had a very clear vision. I want to simplify banking, and I want to make banking more inclusive for all. Now, that was the purpose of the business, right? And by the way, we're not trying to this charity and other thing woven into that. But that became kind of the The marching, if you will, the guiding light, the north star. Uh, another one was start, uh, looked at Kareem, which is owned by Uber now. But it's the largest ride sharing company in all of the Middle East and North Africa and that whole region. And they started with a very simple idea.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  They wanted to make rides accessible to people who otherwise can't get access. In socially conservative societies where women were not allowed to drive with a stranger. How are we gonna make that possible? How are we gonna, because without a driver, they can't, they're immobilized, they can't, they're not allowed to drive themselves. And they aren't allowed to drive with a stranger. So how are we gonna unlock possibility for them? And then how are we gonna make life better for the drivers who they call captains? So that was Kareem's story that, you know, we are here to unlock value in a profound way for people. Uh, I looked at Mom's World, Mona Ataya. The, and so these are all conversations I've had in this series of podcasts coming out.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Where Mona talks about how she started Mom's World. Which is an online platform for mothers, young mothers in the Middle East. So, you know, you start to see founders in different parts of the world. Who really, the successful ones start with, as you said, an ideal. And the ideal does four things. So let me clarify those to you as well. The first you clarified very clearly is directional. It creates directional clarity for everybody in our organization that are aligned. We know what we are doing, why we're doing it, where we're going. The second one is motivational, it gets employees all excited and inspired around this ambition, vision.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  The third one is reputational, it's good for brand, customers seem to trust companies that have a purpose. And the last one is, the one that we haven't discussed so far, that I hadn't thought of either, was relational. In a world of ecosystems and platforms where companies are trying to collaborate with others. Companies with purpose are seen as transparent, trustworthy. I know where you're coming from. So I feel a natural affinity to wanna work with you. So there are four benefits, if I may say. Of purpose that I think small companies have, some of them at least have understood very clearly. And so have many large companies.

• 16:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you see this around these four things, are there companies that can pick a purpose and actually mess up the business? So whether that is they picked the wrong purpose for the team they have or the opportunity set or something like that, or they pick a purpose and then somehow don't execute, I guess, correctly against it? Like, how do you think about maybe the mistakes that could occur if somebody's going through the process of picking a purpose?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Great question. The first thing companies do wrong is they'll engage in what I would call purpose washing. They create a purpose to just kind of give themselves cover. Theranos had a purpose when they were going to be accused of fraud, right? Purdue Pharmaceuticals, that is responsible for the opioid epidemic. Their purpose was compassion for patients and excellence in science inspire our pursuit of new medicine.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  So that's the biggest mistake you can make is like, you know, trying to engage in what you might call superficial purpose or convenient purpose. But I think the point we need to understand about purpose is purpose is a forcing mechanism to ask yourself, what business do we want to be? Because to answer that question, you have to really debate and discuss. Now, having said that, could you get the answer wrong? Yes. But then you periodically revisit your purpose. You don't do it every six months. But I think is that if you really thought about it, you give it a chance to really run its course and drive it in the organization in a serious, substantial way. But, you know, if you look at, you know, Microsoft's purpose,

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Microsoft has evolved its purpose as the market conditions changed. And I can just tell you, for instance, it used to be in the eighties, it was to put a computer on every desk and at every home. Under Palmer, when it didn't do very well, it was to create a family of devices and services for individuals and businesses that empower people around the globe at home or work and the goal for the activities they value the most. You can see why that didn't work. Right? And now it's to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Best Buy has evolved its purpose. Johnson & Johnson, with one of the oldest kind of purpose statements, the Credo, has also evolved its purpose. So we call it kind of modernizing or doing a refresh on your purpose. Lego did it. So there's so many examples of companies that have been around for a while that will do a periodic refresh.

• 19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  When you have a really strong purpose, how does that help you during bad times? And I think a lot about being inspired. Everyone always thinks of, well, of course that you're more productive. You work harder, you get the goal, right? You accomplish more. But it also feels like during bad times, having a strong purpose may keep you around or it may allow you to kind of get punched in the face a couple of times and not quit. Was there anything that came up in your interviews and kind of the creation of the book that really highlighted this?

• 19:58Speaker 02

  So that's a great question. And I think given where we are right now in the economy with economic headwinds, it's a fair question to be asking ourselves, right? So the first thing I did, I wanted to share with you, I did a 2010 study where I looked at companies during down markets and every single recession since 2000, since 1945. And what I found was that there are 9% of companies that actually use downtimes to get ahead. So never waste a good crisis. Never waste a good recession, if you want to call it that. So what do we need to understand about these companies that do this well? Now, I won't bore you with that study that was published in 2010 in the Harvard Business Review. But I think the point I want to make over here is as far as purpose is concerned, purpose

• 20:42Speaker 02

  is not the only answer for down markets. So I want to be very clear about that. But what purpose, you know, when you're in down markets, you are forced to make very difficult trade offs, very difficult trade offs, choices. Where are we going to contract? Where are we going to expand? And that's a very hard decision. How do you take from Peter and give to Paul? And say, I'm going to cut here, but I'm going to expand here. The easy answer is the cheese slicer. Everybody give me 10% equal, equal pain spread across. And that's a recipe for nothing. That's a recipe for mediocrity. Those 9% of companies understand how to do that.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  And purpose is a wonderful filtering system. I just talked to somebody this morning who was a CEO of a company in Europe. And he said, you know, we are bracing for one of the worst winters ahead. We're going to have, you know, energy cuts. We're going to have to shut down our plants. We're going to have to, you know, send people home and we've got to make payroll and we're going to have customers who won't have money to pay us.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  We are ready for some really, really difficult months ahead. And the question is, can purpose help?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  No, I'm not saying it's going to give you the... Purpose doesn't give us the answers, but it allows us to think in some kind of programmatic and systematic intentional way about how to consider those trade-offs. So I actually think that, and by the way, if you really use your purpose in these down markets, it's a crucible moment people will not forget. It will, if you're looking for a way to really bake your purpose into your DNA, nothing like a down market where you lean into your purpose, invoke and remind everybody about why you're doing what you're doing and how that has been shaped by your purpose. So, nothing like a good crisis, never waste one.

• 22:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it returns to this idea of like tough times make tough people, right? And the tough people end up being very loyal to each other and they kind of went through the shit together and, and come out on the other side stronger. Um, but it does go back to whether it's good times or bad times, the communication of the purpose. So I almost think of this as you have to select a purpose, usually that is done by the leadership of an organization. It may be in collaboration with people within the org or maybe not. Uh, but there is a purpose that is selected. Did you see any best practices or mistakes in terms of how to actually communicate this? And I jumped to a couple of data points that just kind of, uh, come to the top of my mind. I worked at Facebook for a few years and there was not necessarily one single purpose that was plastered on all of the walls,

• 23:26Anthony Pompliano?

  but there were these kind of, uh, underlying ethos, right? Move fast and break things, uh, uh, that were all over the walls. And it kind of reinforced it almost implicitly, which then went up to the, the overall purpose of the business, uh, which was to connect every person in the world. I also think about, uh, the reinforcement of maybe at an all hands meeting or in, uh, weekly communications with the team, just constantly reminding people. What, what were the best practices there? And maybe even mistakes that you uncovered in terms of how people communicate the purpose to their organizations?

• 23:59Speaker 02

  Another really great question. You know, I think is the mistake we make is we think of purpose as a change management exercise. You know, okay, tell everyone, you know, describe the change, communicate the change, break it down into small steps, get a, you know, coalition on board, show some short-term wins. It's not a change. This is a more fundamental exercise about who are we and why do we exist? And I don't think it's, you know, putting the purpose statement out there and plastering it on the walls and emails ain't gonna do it either. I mean, purpose has to connect to people at an emotional level, not only intellectual level.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  It's not only an intellectual exercise. You've got to connect it to, and that's why I think telling it as a powerful story,

• 24:50Speaker 02

  connecting it to our past. Who are we? Where have we come from? In the Lego case, the Lego founder actually, the Lego CEO went back and understood the founder's journey. What were they doing in nineteen thirties to create this company? Like, what was the intent? What was intelligent play? The idea that, you know, playfulness can also have some cerebral effects as well. How do we think about intelligent play? And what does that really mean? But at the same time, looking forward, this is not a recreating of the past. So how do we learn to be both looking backwards while looking forward? How do we have a forward-looking spin on purpose that is grounded in our who we are?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  You know, some companies talk about detecting their purpose, not discovering their purpose. Right? And then, once you have it, how do you communicate it? You know, at Pepsi, another company, you know, Indra Nooyi talked about purpose in very personal terms, saying, let me tell you about my personal life story. Here's where I grew up. My family had four buckets which they could fill at four AM every morning when the water came for fifteen minutes. And so I understand what it means not to have water. You know, I know what water shortages are really like. And here is why I think Pepsi needs to think about water conservation. So she was willing to go there. So, and then that's not the CEO, other levels down. So how do we communicate?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  The CMO of Pepsi at the time, Frank Cooper, described it to me. He said, you know what? It was complete surround sound performance.

• 26:26Anthony Pompliano?

  As you see these organizations and these leaders who really kind of lean in, have a strong purpose, communicate it well, do we also have data that suggests that those companies end up not just performing well today, but enduring over the long term? Like, one of the ideas around purpose is, as the leadership, the founder, right, you mentioned Lego founder, they either retire, they pass away. I'm guessing that purpose would be very helpful in keeping that organization kind of on track, but I don't know if you have actual kind of research or data that would suggest that.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  So I'm smiling because I'm on the hunt for that right now because it's really hard to measure company purpose. How do you measure their purpose orientation? So people have tried survey research. They use annual reports and try to create counts out of that. There's a hunt on right now to kind of index company purpose and then try to see if it correlates in some way to financial returns. And I'm part of that hunt. I would say right now, we only have suggestive evidence that suggests that purpose-driven companies are more innovators, are able to drive more top-line growth, have better tenure TSR.

• 27:44Speaker 02

  And I think, but it's all large sample wise, it's very suggestive. But I can speak from my 18 companies that I looked at. I could see very clearly how they used purpose to drive their performance. It was a very connected idea and that's where I got those four dimensions from. But the hunt is on and I think people are looking for answers. Is purpose correlated with ESG?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  How does it connect? There's so many of these concepts out there. So I think we will have better data in the years to come, including from me, I hope.

• 28:21Anthony Pompliano?

  So on that line, if we see that purpose can transcend leadership teams at the same company, and it can be persistent, even if it is updated every decade or whatever, when people are trying to fill leadership roles, should they be trying to find leaders that fit the purpose? Or do they hire people and then allow them to kind of change the purpose of the company as the leadership changes? Like, it's kind of a chicken and egg question, but to some degree, are you constantly over a 50 or 100-year timeframe, just looking for people who embody the purpose? And that's the way that we see organizations be successful?

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Or does the purpose maybe kind of vary within some framework because the leadership changes and everyone is a little bit different?

• 29:09Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's interesting. First of all, I want to clarify, purpose is a two-step process. Having purpose means I want to know what my intent is, right? And then the second step is, okay, what's in that intent? You know, who am I here to serve? And who is more important? And how do I see my business model, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? So one is having intent. Second one is what's in my intent? And I think it's important to understand now, to your point, I have a whole chapter in my book, and I've also kind of directly questioned this in two of my podcast interviews, where I ask especially strong founder leaders, that how do you think about succession?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Because purpose gets so woven up in the persona of that individual. Howard Schultz, look at that. Poor guy can't retire. He keeps leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back to Starbucks. And every time he comes back, he says Starbucks has lost its soul. And so you see that happened to Phil Knight at Nike. So it's not uncommon. You saw that at Google. So it's not uncommon to see these kind of founders struggling to let go. And I think we have to ask ourselves, how do you think about succession? As Kevin Johnson, the former CEO of Starbucks, said to me, he says, "My biggest challenge

• 30:32Speaker 02

  when I took over was to go from being a founder-led organization to a founder-inspired organization." And this is not easy. Now, to your next part of your question is...

• 30:44Speaker 02

  Should a leader, should you bring in people who will change the purpose? Or will you, I think you first of all should be hiring people who are bought into the purpose you have today. And I think those same leaders who are bought into the purpose today should be able to be smart enough to say, you know, we need, but I think that purpose is a filter of who you bring in. Once in a while you change your purpose and sometimes you bring in an outsider. So you say, ah, gotta change our purpose, you know, people are too wedded to what we do. We gotta, but a lot of times purpose shifts are not radical. This is not like our purpose of business has changed completely overnight.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Right? This is not BlackBerry going from a device company to a software company.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Um, so I think there's evolution and revolution in there and being able to challenge it. But it's a, it's a fair question. Uh, I don't think there's any research on it and I, but I will tell you that founder led is a hard one. The purpose gets wound up, it's like personality fixation.

• 31:42Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:24Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining, the world's largest marketplace for mining hardware and hosting. With Compass, everyone can mine Bitcoin. You can do it at home or in one of their 23 hosting facilities around the world. All you need to do to start mining your own Bitcoin is go to compassmining.io today. Again, if you want to get into Bitcoin mining, go check out compassmining.io today. How do you filter in the interview process to actually know somebody is aligned with the purpose? Versus just feeding you a bunch of nonsense that sounds good, but maybe they don't align? Is there anything that you've uncovered there of, you know, you're going to hire a new CEO? You're going to hire a new executive, maybe even just a mid-level manager?

• 33:49Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you know that they actually are aligned with the purpose versus they're just a good interviewer?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  So look, you're asking the universally hard challenge of how do you filter and screen people?

• 34:00Anthony Pompliano?

  You're supposed to have the answers. That's why I'm here.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Anyone will tell you, one of the hardest things we struggle with is hiring.

• 34:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 34:08Speaker 02

  How do we filter in people? And I'll tell you, I wrote a case on Netflix not long ago. Now Netflix is less about purpose and more about their culture.

• 34:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  They're big on cultural fit. So what do they do? They actually publish their culture deck. Now they're called a culture memo. They got rid of PowerPoint, so they made a culture memo. But they put it out there for anybody, competitors, anybody to see, and then they want recruits to have read it. Now they're not going to ask you to mouth off and repeat what's in the culture memo. But they'll try to suss it out by asking you about your life experiences, what have you done? Moments you've faced in life. So people always try to get at these values, questions. I think by asking people like, tell me about adversity you've had to deal with. You know, tell me about a difficult moment that came up in your life. Tell me about choices and trade-offs you've had to make.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  I but I do think that, you know, at Netflix, they call it, we only hire fully formed adults. Now, I'm not implying any kind of what is fully formed or partially formed, I won't go that far. But, you know, we need to ask ourselves, like, here's the, okay, let me give you the rub. The rub is going to be, you find someone who's an absolute star performer. The perfect competence, capability, experience that you really want. Either hiring them or they're already in your organization. But they don't fit the purpose, they don't fit the values, they don't fit the culture. What are you gonna do?

• 35:43Speaker 02

  That's where the rubber hits the road.

• 35:44Anthony Pompliano?

  What is interesting about that is at a startup of a smaller company, I think it could be absolutely catastrophic to hire that person. Because if you've got 10 people, and this is gonna be one of the 10, 10% of your employee base, right, doesn't fit the culture and values, that might be a pretty big deal. What I see large organizations do is they still may hire the high performer or whatever. But to your point, I don't know if it's because they know it's not a culture fit, or they're just not screening or filtering or asking the questions around, do you align with the purpose? Like, it's actually pretty rare, if you think of these large organizations,

• 36:26Anthony Pompliano?

  how many of them, you know, if you had to grade, I don't know, the S and P 500, and you gave a, you know, an A to F grade, I don't know, like, how many do you think you'd give an A on purpose to?

• 36:39Speaker 02

  So, look, I think at one level, you might say, like, some people in these organizations might believe that, you know, it's law, large numbers, one person through, everybody knows.

• 36:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  Promotions, bonuses, these are massive signals of what is expected of us here. We have one of our absolute best cases at Harvard Business School. It's called Rob Parsons at Morgan Stanley. And it's about this guy, it's fictional, the name is disguised, but it's really Morgan Stanley, and it's from like 20 plus years ago. He is brought in by his boss to build a new business. They've been struggling to break into this business, and he's been told if he delivers, he's gonna make manager, he was managing correct in a year. And boy, does he deliver. He nails the market. They have double-digit share of the entire market in a year.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Twenty-five years ago, he's bringing in sixty million dollars in fees that year alone. He is absolutely a rock star on every dimension. Unfortunately, they started at three sixty that year. And the behaviors he's showing don't fit the culture. You know, they haven't got a purpose yet, so there's more of a culture-fit story than a purpose-for-showy. But there's noise around this guy. And so that's where the case stops. And the question is, you're the boss who hired him, you promised him promotion in one year. You have to now make a recommendation as to whether you're going to recommend him promotion or not.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And the class splits.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Half will say, yes, I promised him, he's delivering. And the other half will say, no way.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  It's a great case to teach, I gotta tell you. People clash a lot. And I saw this in, again, in these interviews I did. You know, the great leaders are very clear about who they hire. Mona Ataya at Mum's World said, that was a clear filter for her. She said, I didn't even talk about their competencies. We can teach you competencies. I wanted to know, why do you want to join us? What's exciting to you about wanting to come and work at Mum's World? What are we doing that seems to resonate with who you are? That was the filter. Right? And so versus, walk me through your resume, let me do a rundown. And this is true in other organizations, large companies. I mentioned one more.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  I was a long time ago now, this is dated maybe eight, ten years ago. I was sitting next to a pilot on a plane. And he was off duty and he said, I said, what are you doing? And he was interviewing for jobs. He was from a regional, he was going to national carriers. And I said, so where do you want to work? And he said, oh, no question. I wish Southwest gives me a job. I said, why? He said, all my other interviews, they were technical interviews. They wanted to ask me technical questions. And I went to Southwest, there were three pilots there, and all they wanted to talk about was me. And at the end of the interview, I thought I really bombed it. So I asked them, I don't want to ask technical questions. They said, look, we have your flight records. We know you can fly a plane. We want to know if you really fit us. Because only if you fit us, will you really do what we hope you will do.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  And so, you know, I think great organizations understand that they create the guardrails, the barriers to who they want to let in, and then who they're going to promote and reward, and how they're going to reward. Yes, we need performance, please. I, I just want to be very clear, I am not anti-performance. I'm saying, yes, we need to reward returns, performance, but we also, as we hear, you know, the late Jack Welch used to say, "Performance and behavior slash values." And I want to be very clear, yes, performance, but the other dimension was behavior slash values, and if you're low on the value of behaviors...

• 40:34Anthony Pompliano?

  As you see leaders who are able to set these purposes, clearly articulate them, recruit the right people, how do they talk to shareholders about the purpose? And shareholders and employees or colleagues, hopefully, having signed aligned incentives, where if the business does well, the employees will do well and the shareholders will do well. But it is a different group of people, and I'm not sure, other than usually the most controversial leaders or stocks, do we see people drawing lines in sand and basically saying, you know, "If you're X type of shareholder, we don't want you."

• 41:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Usually, they're, they're much more politically correct and a little bit more polished than that. But it does feel like purpose is somewhat of a line-drawing exercise. We're here for X and we're not here for, you know, other things. Do you see anyone doing this well, or did you get anything from your conversations and interviews with now, you know, hundreds of people around shareholder communication around purpose?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  So, excellent question. Let me start, can I flip it around? First of all, why do shareholders care about purpose? That was part of it, right? And then let's get to how do you communicate purpose to shareholders?

• 41:54Speaker 02

  So, let me start, so, you know, as you know, Larry Fink wrote the foreword to my book, and I was inspired by Larry to actually write this book, but I was puzzled at first, like, why would a shareholder or representative of shareholder care about purpose? I then also talked to Temasek, the Sovereign Wealth Fund of Singapore, and I interviewed Dylan Pille, the CEO there.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  And I came to realize that the vast majority of investors are long-term investors. Of course, we have some short-term investors too, who care about short-term returns. But the vast majority of us are pension funds, retirement funds, you know, indexing out there for the long horizon. We have a long horizon into business. So, and their take was, how do I ask a business to keep an eye on the price? And purpose is a way for me to understand what is your long-term vision? And by the way, remember what I said earlier, whenever any business tries to imagine their long-term reason for being, they naturally will have to think about employees, customers, communities, and even the planet, right?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  So I'm just asking you, hey, I have long-term investors. I want to share with them what your long-term vision for your business is. And long-term vision for anyone encompasses shareholder value, customer value, community value, employee value, all of them feed into and reinforce shareholder value, actually. So I just want to know what is it that you really believe in? It's a statement about who are you and why you as a business exist? What's your unique place in the world? So people have confused this into like, oh, investors are forcing businesses to do ESG. And they're really forcing them to do sustainability and it's pushing their agenda onto them. They're saying if you're a long-term business, you have to have some ESG standards because

• 43:49Speaker 02

  society is going to impose them on you. So you better have a perspective on this because it's becoming mandatory almost in the world. So I, as an investor, really care about that. So I think there's a kind of twisting of this logic that has happened. So investors care, keeping in mind long-term value of a business, viability of a business. Now the question becomes, how do I communicate that to shareholders? And I think is, you know, I think it's the clearer you are about the choices you're making. I've interviewed a number of CFOs for this, actually. To understand that CFO story, and how do CFOs present themselves to the market?

• 44:32Speaker 02

  And I first, I think you're right about one thing, your instincts were that there's a bit of a a matching that happens in the shareholder market. What kind of investors do I really wanna have? In my, you know, mix of investors? And clarifying how you're imagining your business makes it easier to see what kind of investor pool you're gonna attract. Uh, but beyond that, you're creating kind of expectations with investors. Like, look, we are right now, even when we do large investment project, we say, look, the quarterly returns for the next several quarters are gonna be a little soft because we are about to embark on this huge initiative that is gonna double our manufacturing capacity in Asia. And you're gonna see payback out of that three quarters down the road.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  So I think, you know, purpose is level setting in some ways. With investors, as it is with other stakeholders, employees, customers, and communities. Uh, I think one that we don't talk about, we somehow imagine investors as this kind of incredibly myopic, only quarter to quarter returns driven individuals. And there are some who are like that. But there are others who are not.

• 45:48Anthony Pompliano?

  As I hear you talking about the shareholders and purpose, I think a lot about, uh, in the crypto decentralized world, whatever. They're not businesses, which I think everyone, uh, um, at least at the moment, they're not viewed that way and don't seem to operate that way. But what I do find fascinating is that when something is decentralized, it's the equivalent of a company with no leadership team, right? If you took the CEO, the CFO, kind of the, the, the C-suite out. Now, you and I probably could think of a million reasons why that would go horrifically wrong. Right? Without leadership, without hierarchical structure, without, uh, uh, uh, some sort of

• 46:32Anthony Pompliano?

  true purpose and, and, and planning and strategy, like that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Probably many case studies inside of your classroom end up, uh, uh, being some version of that. But what I do find fascinating is that if you take something like a Bitcoin, there was a creator, we don't know who it is, but they put purpose or, or, or some sort of direction down on paper in the white paper. And then they disappear. And it's almost like a founder kind of retiring or, or, or leaving or whatever. But there hasn't been the reinforcement. And so I always think about like, first of all, the idea is big enough and quote, quote, powerful enough, right? Where people get excited about it without having kind of all the normal aspects of a business. But also, the purpose was so clear that it has persisted.

• 47:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, it's only been 13, 14 years, but if it continues the way it's going, it really is this like powerful, clear message. And so the reason why I use that is like, that is succeeding against the odds, right? If you're able to take a really clear, powerful message, and then you have a CEO, you have a board, you have kind of all the things that we know make businesses great, it feels like this is almost like a secret weapon for the businesses that understand it. And as you've talked, you know, kind of through our conversation, it does feel like maybe companies are waking up to this and realizing that some did it naturally, and that was their intuition, and there wasn't so much a strategic reason as much as that's just how they operated their business.

• 47:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But now, do you hear and see founders or executive teams talking about this from a strategic standpoint, saying, hey, we've been in business for 20, 30, 40 years, we don't have a purpose that is clearly articulated. We need to do it because it is a talent retention tool. It is a, you know, advantage in the marketplace. It is, you know, A, B, or C reason. Or is it, no, the companies that start out with a strong purpose are the ones who keep them, but you don't really see companies who start out with no or weak purposes end up being able to transition into those strong purposes?

• 48:32Speaker 02

  So let me start with the first part of your question around decentralized finance, and that's a fascinating question also. So I'll look within our organization first, then we'll talk about these kind of diffuse entities that are not even organizations per se.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  What do organizations do? When you, you know, as soon as you have five, 10, 15 people coming together, even two people coming together in a household, we have a division of labor. Who's gonna do what? Ask coordination, right? So we want to have collaboration and coordination of that. So, you know, who's doing what, and in what sequence, and how we're gonna do this, that, and the other.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  As you get bigger, there's a collaboration problem that kicks in. And the other one is what we call the consistency problem. Right? How do we build standards that we have to repeat and do things in a consistent way? Now, what do we do? We build elaborate organizational structures. We build silos. We build KPIs. We build metrics. We do all this stuff to kind of, we build processes. So we call it structures and processes and culture. Structure, process, culture are the three kind of control systems we use to regulate the individuals who are in that small or large organization. Right? Now, some would argue that structure and process stifle our creativity.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  It boggers us down in bureaucracy and we resist, but we can't. We need silos. We need accountability. We need process discipline.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Now, if you believe that purpose is another way to regulate behavior, if you want to call it that. Culture is a control system, so is purpose. It creates guardrails. It creates guidelines. And if it's a deep purpose and you've internalized it, it is really going to be a guardrail for you. Does that then allow you the chance to loosen your structure and loosen your processes?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  And so what I saw was companies that were, you know, everyone talks about empowerment, but there's a lot of people talking about fake empowerment. You talk about it, but you don't really do it, right?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  With purpose, possibility, I'm not saying it works always because purpose is not like people are buying in all the time. You have the possibility to loosen your structure and processes to create more real, genuine empowerment. I wrote a whole chapter on this, by the way. Now you've taken it to an interesting stream of like, can you have confederations of organizations connected through a purpose or individuals that are somehow able to find alignment with each other and trust with each other?

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Open question. I think possible. I don't think there's enough research for me to definitively say that, you know, if only Ethereum and Bitcoin and others kind of articulate a purpose, they're gonna really be able to create alignment among the disparate entities and individuals who are operating and working in those markets. I think it's an idea. It's interesting. It's an intriguing thought. I don't really have an answer to that one. But I had to, I did mention earlier to you that organizations with purpose are perceived as more transparent and trustworthy by others, which is in the eyes of the beholder.

• 51:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. I don't know what the answer is either. It is a very unique thing, which obviously, I think, has kind of taken the world by storm. But when you think of it through this purpose lens, it is, yeah, it feels like there's something there. And it's hard, obviously, the intuition versus the data will take a long time to kind of clear out. One of the examples I think I'm personally most fascinated by is the company Coinbase, which, I don't know, maybe it was last summer or so, the CEO and founder of the business came out and said, look, there's a whole bunch of stuff going on internally, kind of this idea of

• 52:36Anthony Pompliano?

  like the the lack of clarity around why we're here. And so he put together a piece and clearly articulated, we are here to do this. And it was really around financial empowerment and kind of why he started the business. And a couple of takeaways for me were, one, it's easy for the founder to do that because he could say, hey, I started this business. You know, we're almost a decade later. Let me remind everyone why I started this business. And so coming from him, I think was powerful. Two, I thought it was fascinating. He didn't just send it internally. He published it publicly, to your point. But the third thing was, he got a lot of blowback. And there was a lot of people who said, not even so

• 53:19Anthony Pompliano?

  much, we don't like your purpose. It was, we don't like the fact that you're stating one purpose and saying, we are not here for these other purposes. And so I think in hindsight, a year later, if you were to ask him, and I've seen him on interviews and stuff talk about, he's very happy. He kind of took the route that he did. He thinks it was a net positive for the business. I also think that it takes a special type of person and a unique business to do that versus if that had been Disney or Coca-Cola or, you know, one of these businesses who was not founder led anymore, who had not been around for only, you know, a decade or so. How do you think about this?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  So I don't know enough about the Coinbase story. So I don't want to comment on that necessarily, but I think there's an interesting idea behind your question. So one of my colleagues, you mentioned Disney. So one of my colleagues actually, once Steve Jobs realized that he was going to pass away in a finite time, he hired two of my colleagues to come and start to write cases about Apple.

• 54:27Speaker 02

  And he wasn't going to do a purpose of Apple. That was not his thing. He didn't want to, he didn't believe in one liners. But he felt that was important to capture the philosophy, the principles that made Apple who it is. And he thought the best way to do that is capture historical decisions they made and the rationale and how they thought through those decisions. So purpose was going to be inferred through these key decisions that Apple had made in the past. And there was a story behind that because Steve had been on the board of Disney. And what really frustrated him at Disney's board meetings was whenever they had a difficult decision to make,

• 55:09Speaker 02

  somebody on the board would say, let's think about what Walt would have done if he was here. And Steve said, Walt is not here. He died decades ago. The world has changed. Why are we trying to channel Walt right now?

• 55:27Speaker 02

  And we need to be thinking forward. So his idea of distilling the Apple secret sauce

• 55:35Speaker 02

  was let's look at some key decisions we have made over time. And I want every employee to go through this, these discussions of these decisions, because through them they'll understand the essence of what makes Apple, Apple.

• 55:53Anthony Pompliano?

  And when you see that, does it take the type of leader who is willing to hire your colleagues and say, I know this is special, I want to document this and kind of is self-aware enough to realize that not every corporation has the purpose, has the process, has kind of the ethos and everything that makes Apple special? Is that the same type of leader that is needed to actually execute correctly as well? Like, you need self-awareness to be able to set the right purpose and kind of really drive it home on a consistent basis with the employees?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  I think you have to buy into the idea that this essence of an organization is key to your competitive advantage. It has to be a priority for you. It has to be the... And I think Steve only realized that when he himself saw his own mortality and said, oops, I'm going to be gone. And of course, Tim is going to do a great job, which he has done, but I want to be able to distill the essence of what makes us special.

• 56:53Speaker 02

  And our purpose, which I can infer through these key decisions and moments, will allow people in generations to come to capture that special element of Apple. It's not a culture document. It's not even a purpose statement. It's something that has to be distilled and inferred. And I want people to remember that. And I think so some leaders understand that there is an essence about this. What is the secret sauce? The founder of Kareem said, it's our superpower.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  It's really what makes us different. And people, he said, most businesses don't seem to realize that. He's an ex-McKinsey consultant. And he says, I never realized it, but now that I've been in it and built a billion-dollar business and successfully built it and sold it and I'm still running it, I've come to realize, he said, from my experience, is our superpower. Why did David Velez say that? Or the founder of Arco Dorados, the largest franchisee of McDonald's in the world with over 1,500 locations? Why would he say that? I found these podcast interviews I did to be fascinating because a lot of the founders talked in very eloquent terms about having this essence being the secret sauce.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  And they appreciated it because they said, as we grow bigger, it's naturally easy to lose it. It fades away.

• 58:23Anthony Pompliano?

  One aspect that I think is very interesting, you said you've interviewed a lot of sports coaches. And so if you especially think at the college level and a little bit at the professional level, inside of a business, you get people that are hired and you hope that they stay and work with you for 10, 20 years. If you're a college coach, I think you mentioned Pete Carroll, Nick Saban, folks like that. At the college level, every three or four years, basically you have a whole new team, right? Because they come in, they're there for three or four years, then they go and hopefully they go play at the next level, or they go and they get regular jobs and kind of they're off the team. Having a purpose that is able

• 59:08Anthony Pompliano?

  to bridge between each one of these different teams, because really every year is a different team, but there's a lot of overlap, feels like a pretty good way to ensure that you can build some of these dynasties that these coaches have built. Because really, that's one of the only things between the coach and what the purpose or kind of the mission of the organization is. Other than that, almost every year, a lot of things change.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  So, look, you know, the first thing I learned from these sports coaches, who are extraordinary individuals, by the way, is that, as one of them said to me, Pete said to me, he said, "Look, I unlock human potential." Right? My job is to take a individual who's saying, "I am performing at my best," and take them to a level that they didn't think they could do. Right? That's what we do as coaches. And I think college sports is one of the most extraordinary illustrations of that, where a coach takes a team and gets them individually and collectively to perform at a level that they didn't even think they could do. And it's individually and collectively. Right? And I think is, now, you know this

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  as well as I do, people will do a lot for themselves when their own self-interest is at stake. But if they have a commitment to a collective, a tribe, a family, their team, we know that people are willing to do even more for a collective that they really buy into than they are for themselves.

• 1:00:42Speaker 02

  Right? And so what we are trying to do is help people, how do you bind them to the collective in a way that they feel so identified with the collective? And purpose is one way to do that. It's also self-awareness. What's your purpose here? Are you here to just be a great football player? Uh, and make a lot of money and join the NFL? Is that your life purpose? And that inspires a lot of people to do a lot, right? People are willing to do a lot for pay for performance. But if you remind them that, listen, you also can imagine what your individual purpose is in life and put money and success in perspective. And hopefully then think about how am I becoming a better player? A better human being?

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  How am I advancing my own whole self through my sport? You might show up differently. And I think that's the beauty of what I think some of these coaches understand. That, you know, you're not trying to be naively idealistic here. But you're also trying to say, I want to elevate their thinking and elevate how they show up. I mean, look at what's happening in the war in Ukraine, folks. I mean, think about it. I don't, are you telling me that Ukrainians are genetically more courageous than anybody else? When you are bought into a cause, you show up differently.

• 1:02:11Anthony Pompliano?

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• 1:04:19Anthony Pompliano?

  at www.amberdata.io/pomp. Again, that's amberdata.io/pomp. Go check them out today. You see this for sure during wartime. I think you see it during games. People like to celebrateize the underdog versus the people who think they're supposed to win, all that type of stuff. But also, I think at the individual level, and I know that you have used purpose to have more honest conversations with individuals. I know that you think the talk of purpose elicits different types of responses, maybe avoids the CEO speak. Talk a little bit about throughout your career. You've talked to a lot of people, right?

• 1:05:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And at all the degrees of success. And it seems like this topic specifically has led you to a different type of conversation with people that, one, you enjoy, but also, two, it seems like you've learned different things about certain people than maybe you otherwise wouldn't if you weren't talking about purpose.

• 1:05:23Speaker 02

  So I have to confess to you, this is all new to me, and the way you said it is exactly right. I wrote the book, I interviewed people about their company purpose, and I was like, tell me about the company purpose and how you did it. And then when I started this podcast series, I first started my first interview like, okay, tell me about your company purpose and what did you do? And then I stumbled into asking the question, tell me about your purpose. Why are you here? Tell me, how did you come to realize your own purpose? When did you first start thinking about your purpose? And I have to tell you, these are very, I felt very fortunate to be talking to these very influential, important, successful leaders from all over the world. The conversation shifted.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  It was a much more, I would say, authentic and intimate conversation. And I learned, you know, every leader, there's a story behind a story. You, you can talk to them as CEO of an important company and what they're doing for the company, but it's really hard to tap into their humanity, like, who are you really? And this purpose conversation about their individual purpose, before I even get to their company purpose, led to, I would say, a very different set of conversations. And I learned so much about leadership through these conversations in the process.

• 1:06:49Anthony Pompliano?

  What has been the most surprising thing? So you went in, you said you were a skeptic. Now, you're not a skeptic. So that's like, surprise, one, is just, it seems like you, you're a convert, right? Which, which is good. But is there anything that, outside of just, now I believe, that has really surprised you? And kind of looking back, you're like, I can't believe that's the thing I took away from it?

• 1:07:14Speaker 02

  So the first thing I realized was purpose is good for business. Right? That's one thing like who's gonna say, oh, we don't wanna have a purpose. The other thing I want, purpose is good for us individually.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  There's data research showing that people with purpose not only are more satisfied and engaged at work. They have healthier health, better health outcomes. You know, they are less likely to get sick, chronic diseases. You know, heart attacks, stroke, dementia. Having purpose is good for us. I mean, what does it mean not to have a purpose? I don't wanna have a purpose. And we then say, oh, I don't want a purpose is only making money and shareholder value. It's like breathing, folks. We all need to breathe to live, of course, but do we live to breathe? I don't think so.

• 1:08:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That leads me to my last question, which is like the softball of all. What's your purpose?

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  So I have to tell you, you know. I feel very fortunate to be working at an institution where my my purpose aligns very closely with the organization's purpose. We educate leaders who make a difference in the world.

• 1:08:33Speaker 02

  And that very closely summarizes how I think about my work-related purpose. Which is we I educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Now, remember, our life purpose has many sleeves to it. Work is one, family is another, you know, avocations is another one. So for me, I feel very fortunate that my my purpose that is related to work very close, I educate leaders who make a difference in the world. Hopefully, positive difference in the world.

• 1:09:04Anthony Pompliano?

  What about your personal purpose?

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  You know, I think we I I really believe that my purpose is to be able to have a positive impact on the communities and the people I'm surrounded by.

• 1:09:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what does that mean in terms of as you've done all this work on purpose? How do you actually live that on a day to day basis? Because I think one of the pieces is people will listen to this and they'll say to themselves, I get it. Purpose is important for business. Purpose is important for better life and kind of the inspiration and all that stuff. How do I take the purpose and imply and apply it on a day to day basis?

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  So the first thing we have to realize is purpose is an evolving story. My purpose when I was in my early twenties was different, right? My purpose when I was a young parent became different, right? Suddenly my purpose had changed into my family, my children. I have responsibility for them, right? My purpose today at this age and stage is different. And I look at my own self and I ask myself like, have I made a positive difference in anything that I've done today? You know, where am I? Through my research, through my teaching, through my interactions? You know, I think we very, sometimes we focus on value capture, right? We all measure like, okay, what came in the door today into the bank account? Value capture.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  I think at some point you start to say, I want to focus on value creation. Value capture happens when you're naturally, when you're creating value, value capture happens. But how am I creating value in the environment and the communities where I operate? Have I had a positive impact in a meaningful and real way?

• 1:10:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that's incredible. I love the idea of there's in value capture and kind of creating the value. I think it's a very important distinction. Where can we send people to find the book or download the podcast as they get excited about listening to these conversations?

• 1:11:04Speaker 02

  So look, the easiest place to go is deeppurpose.net, which is where I have the summary. There's some videos summarizing the book and my research. You can also find me on LinkedIn. There's a newsletter. I don't flood my LinkedIn feed, but I periodically, every few weeks will put out something that relates to my larger interest in unlocking value, unlocking possibility.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  And so deeppurpose.net or LinkedIn, which is just Ranjai Gulati, my name. And I want to thank you. This has been a most enlightening conversation. You have pushed me hard in a good way. So I appreciate that very much. So, thank you.

• 1:11:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I'm very interested in this. I, I find it absolutely fascinating. And the way that you articulated, I think is incredibly powerful. So I hope that everyone who is watching or listening to this goes and checks out the book. And then I'm looking forward to many of the conversations. You, you pretty much hit a, a who's who's list of people that I'd want to hear on the purpose side. So I'm excited to listen to that as well. And thank you for your time today. I think people probably learned a ton from you.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 1:12:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered. Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. Go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io. If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.