In 2005, Gallup Research identified the “four needs of followers” in a study of 10,000 adults in the US. A second study in 2008 across 10 countries confirmed the same four needs.

Since the pandemic shifted many jobs to work-from-home (or anywhere) and the Great Resignation|Reshuffle|Renegotiation|Rethink further upended our work order, organizations have been madly surveying and throwing a lot of stuff at the wall to lure and keep the people they need to run their businesses.

There’s no question that our relationship to work has forever shifted, at least for those whose jobs don’t require a physical presence, and we’ll be wrestling and experimenting with this before we figure it out.

It didn’t start with a pitch deck or a business plan. In 2009 while walking in his San Fernando neighborhood, Rick Nahmais noticed citrus trees bursting with fruit that would mostly end up in the trash. Food lines were growing as the Great Recession ravaged people’s lives and livelihoods. The light bulb went on. The following three weekends, he and a few volunteers harvested over 800 lbs of oranges and tangerines from a friend’s yard and took them to a local food pantry.

Groundhog Day again. Gallup released its State of the Workplace: 2022 report and one headline, Stressed, Sad, and Anxious: A Snapshot of the Workforce, summarizes what is a surprise to no one.

What is a bit different about it, though, is despite the myriad reasons for misery at work shouting at us from headlines daily, Gallup lays blame at the feet of managers.

We spent the last four posts taking a deep dive into how to inclusively unearth the solid core of an organization: vision + mission + values. It’s exhilarating to find just the right words that capture our true essence, and to share and celebrate it. Yet, it’s just the beginning of the beginning. Living our vision, mission, and values — what connects us to the cathedral we’re building together vs. individually laying bricks — is the real work.

In The Culture Code, Dan Coyle recalls in 1982 when J&J learned, to their utter horror, that seven people died in Chicago after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol. They faced a crisis they were utterly unprepared for, they had no playbook. But they had something much more powerful that drove one of their first decisions (ignoring advice from FDA and the FBI) to recall all 31 million pills on the market at a cost of $100 million.

After establishing vision + mission + values as the solid core of a business, we explored the first leg of the stool: the vision — a vivid and detailed picture of success at a chosen point in the future. Coincidentally, Zingerman's last week rolled out their 2032 vision. Their visioning guru, Ari Weinzweig wrote about it in his weekly email, showing how powerful a good vision is — how it can guide an organization to greatness. It’s an inspiring read.

Now, we turn to the second leg of the stool: the mission.

I’d been facilitating vision + mission + values work for almost a decade when I found myself in a ZingTrain Visioning workshop wondering how Zingerman’s, a community of businesses in Ann Arbor, Michigan, spawned from a humble deli, had come up with a tool that would transform visioning and strategy for my clients. Most vision statements are one-liners like Unilever’s “To be the global leader in sustainable business” — lofty, yet not particularly actionable — more of a tagline than a specific future people can build together.

With Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan/Chase combining forces, and Atul Gawande leading it, how could the Haven healthcare venture not work? Formed in 2018 to provide less expensive, better, and easier healthcare in the U.S., Haven is shutting down after just three years. In fact, it seems it never really got going.