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Having a purpose is not the same as a purpose statement. Purpose is an ideal. It is the reason you choose to exist. Professionally, it is why you go to work. Is it a job(money)? Is it a career (get ahead)? Is it a calling (gives you meaning)? Ranjay Gulati joins Kevin to discuss deep purpose at work. He believes it is the foundation for the organization and defines the work experience, including culture. When your organization believes in something, you move your team from not just satisfied or engaged to inspired. An inspired team does the work because they want to.

Key Points

  • In this episode, Ranjay shares how purpose differs from mission, vision, and values. 
  • He discusses practical realism. 
  • He talks about the organizational benefit of deep purpose.

Meet Ranjay

  • Name: Ranjay Gulati 
  • His Story: Ranjay Gulati is the author of several books, including his newest Deep Purpose, the Heart and Soul of High-Performance Companies. He is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor and the former Unit Head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School.
  • Worth Mentioning: Professor Gulati studies how “resilient” organizations—those that prosper both in good times and bad—drive growth and profitability. His work bridges strategy (establishing clear strategic pillars for growth), organizational design (reimagining purposeful and collaborative organizational systems), and leadership (fostering inspired, courageous, and caring execution).

This episode is brought to you by...

Remarkable Masterclasses. Each masterclass is designed to help you become the remarkable leader and human you were born to be. Details on how to get on board for a specific skill or get discounts each month can be found on our website.

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Transcript

Kevin: Do you know the purpose of your business? Is it clear, compelling, and does it lead you to be committed? What is the role of purpose in your personal life, and are those two things connected? Welcome to a fascinating conversation about deep purpose. Welcome to another live episode, specifically of the Remarkable Leadership podcast. We're so glad that you're here.

If you're here live, you can certainly tell us where you're from and say hello in the comments and whatever platform that you're on and while you're here, I want you to imagine that you're joining my guest, who I'll introduce in a second and I for a cup of coffee. So share your questions, your comments and your ideas. And they'll make for a better conversation for us and eventually for a better podcast episode as well.

And if you're listening or watching this podcast later, you're not here live, but you could be in the future and so you can get all future live episodes and interact with us and see them all sooner by joining our Facebook or LinkedIn groups to get information about that. You can just go to RemarkablePodcast.com/Facebook or a remarkablepodcast.com/LinkedIn to do that.

And today's episode is brought to you by Remarkable Masterclasses. Each masterclass is designed to help you become the remarkable leader and human you were born to be. Details on how to get on board for a specific skill or get discounts each month can be found at remarkablemasterclass.com. And that means it's time for me to introduce my guest and bring him up.

Now you can see him and let me give you a little proper introduction for our guest today, and then we will dove in. Talking about deep purpose, Dr. Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R Lawrence MBA class of 1942 professor and former unit head of the Organizational Behavior Unit at Harvard Business School Professor Galati studies how resilient organizations, those that prosper both in good times and bad, can drive growth and profitability.

He is the author of a number of books, including his newest Deep Purpose and the Heart and Soul of High Performance Companies, and he is a frequent guest in media outlets, including CNBC. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard, a master's in management from MIT's Sloan School of Management and two bachelor's degrees in computer science and economics from Washington State University and Saint Stephen's College, New Delhi, respectively.

He lives in Newton, Massachusetts. And today, he is our guest. And I'm so glad he's here. Dr. Galati. Ranjay.

Ranjay: Thank you so much. Kevin, my pleasure to be here with you today and delighted to have a chance to have this conversation with you about my book.

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Kevin: Yeah, I love this book, everybody. So, you know, the back story here is that I don't have a guest on if I have it, if they have a book, if I haven't looked at or before we even say they're coming. And then pretty much you've read all the books when they show up and this is no exception. And I love this book.

So we're going to talk about the purpose. Now, before we get to that, you got an interesting journey. There's no doubt we got a hint of that from the bio. So tell us, how do you end up as a professor at Harvard Business School? Give us the sort of the short version of the journey that leads you here.

You probably didn't grow up in India thinking, I think I want to be a business professor.

Ranjay: Not at all. Absolutely not. And I don't know how most of us listening to this think about it. My journey has been anything but linear. You know, my mother had a business that I describe in the book, and she really wanted me to be a designer like she was to design women's clothes and maybe even men's clothes. And that was what she was thinking I would do.

And but I was working in her business, so she had me in there with my sleeves rolled up, working seven days a week on this kind of venture of hers. So that was my first exposure to business. And then I was going to go to the U.S. and I started computer science and I came here as an exchange student to Washington State University, which was a fabulous experience for me.

And I got a summer job at a no name company back then called Microsoft, and I was supposed to stay there. And then I decided I was going to get a master's. And I came to Boston with the intent of going back to Microsoft and the next thing I knew was my master's required a thesis, and I really enjoyed the research process.

And I was doing a Ph.D. and then the story goes on from there. And next thing I knew, I was a business academic, taking the learnings I had from my early days in business and at Microsoft and saying, How do I use this knowledge to advance an understanding of business? So that's my kind of short version of it.

There are many other twists and turns that I haven't even bothered to describe to you.

Kevin: Well, of course, and that's perfect because I think, you know, I asked that question almost every episode, almost every week, and I think it's always useful to hear from successful people about that journey because there are always, to your point, twists and turns. It seldom comes out the way we think. And I think that's maybe encouraging for people who aren't maybe quite sure where they're at or where they're headed.

But that relates to, I think, the topic, too, of our conversations. Any topic of your new book, which is called Deep Purpose. So how did you end up talking about purpose? And so I'll just ask that question why purpose? Why did you end up talking about, studying about and then writing about purpose in organizations?

Ranjay: 75 years ago you told me you're going to write a book about purpose let's say you had a crystal ball and I met you and I heard Kevin, I want to know my future. And you said, I see purpose as a book in your future. And I would have told you your crazy. I would have asked for my money back.

Kevin: Well, if anyone ever asked me to be the fortune teller, they should just ask for the money. I resolved to start. But go ahead.

Ranjay: No, but it was so far from my mind because, you know, honestly and then the study organizational purpose was even further from my mind because purpose to me was like mission statement. Those wallpaper. Now, I had been doing my own introspection about my own purpose. I must confess to you, you know, you hit your midlife and you're thinking about what am I doing?

Why am I doing it? What else do I want to be doing? And how can I make a difference in the world? And I had I was running a program at HSBC called the Advanced Management Program, which is a senior leader program in the school. And these are people who are in their mid-fifties and senior leaders from all over the world.

And I was deeply inspired by my students because most of them were using this time to interrogate their own purpose for their own lives. But they were also asking the question, what is the purpose of the organization where I'm employed? It wasn't just my life but it was also my work purpose, career purpose. And by the way, I'm a senior leader.

So what should the purpose of my entity that I'm leading be and it was interesting because they would ask me to give them answers. And you're a professor. What do you think? And I'm like, I don't know. And then there was kind of at that time a building purpose, movement purpose became kind of a proxy for stakeholder value.

There was the hijacking of the word purpose going on between shareholder value versus stakeholder value. And there was kind of a purpose debate going on. That purpose was going to be the the magical solve for all problems businesses are facing to it. And, and that got me interested, personally curious. My purpose, business purpose and it was a fundamental question and a turning point that really triggered me to write this book was a conversation I had with two of my friends, both of whom on business.

One of them is Frank Cooper, who is the CMO at BlackRock. And another one is Matt Brad Felder, who is now the head of H.R. at Apollo Investments. And they asked me this question then finance. Right. So in finance, the thing you know what, even investors we are asking this question. Our CEO, Larry Fink, is writing these letters to public company CEOs.

My purpose. What do you have to say about that run? And I said honestly, not much. I don't know much about it. And that led me to realize that maybe purpose is one of those hidden assets unlocking in your language of kind of potential.

Kevin: Yeah. You know, so I love that answer because it hits on pretty much everywhere. I want to take us in this conversation and the first place I want to take us is to that cynical place. Right? You said it well, it's mission, vision, values, purpose. Like, how is this different from those from for people who are saying it's all wallpaper, as you said, like how is this or how can this be different and all of these things, of course, are can be can be awesome.

Right. How would you how would you respond to that?

Ranjay: So, Kevin, first of all, I think people are rightfully cynical about the word purpose. And the reason is a lot of people in business have done a huge disservice to everybody by making purpose is kind of the next big kind of a sugarcoating, if you will, a purpose washing, if you will. And whenever they're in trouble, they parade a purpose.

So if you look at what happened the senator's Senate office was in trouble. Guess what they did? They paraded a new purpose. Oh, we have a purpose. And, you know, look at Purdue Pharmaceuticals. They put in a purpose to look at Facebook they pulled out a purpose in 2016 when they were being hauled up in front of Congress.

So when in doubt, put out a public statement. And this, I think, does a huge disservice to everybody and that honestly also got me confused because on the one hand, I'm hearing, you know, economists or someone said idealists. Well, I don't want to win those two, but they were saying, oh, you know what, business needs to be transformed.

Capitalism needs to be changed. And, by the way, give companies a purpose. And hopefully that will be one of the parts of the solution. On the other hand, you was saying this is a joke. You know, in fact, one of them called it Virtuous Side Hustles. Another one calls it social justice scams, harsh language. But, you know, I think but, you know, we can either get bogged down in that.

But I think that purpose actually is different than the mission vision values. So let's think of what is that? So you think about it. That is at the bottom, this strategy and tactics for what you do. Right above that, you have your cultures and your values and your principles, what you might call it, how you do it above that is the why question.

Now, you might say, and I will tell you, mission and purpose are synonymous it's just they've morphed over time. It used to be called purpose. Once upon a time, it morphed into mission. We're going back to purpose again right now. But what is that? It's not a statement. So let's be very clear. Purpose. Having a purpose is not having a public statement.

Everybody has a purpose statement. They don't even know what it is. But that's what wallpaper is, right? So it's not a purpose is an ideal it's something that you fundamentally believe is the reason you choose to exist. Now, what's in that ideal? There is a goal. First of all, here we are here to serve these customers with this value proposition, and this is how we're going to do it.

Every business articulates a value proposition and a target customer, kind of a set of a goal we do that for ourselves. Also, my ambition or my goal is to be X, Y, and Z. So we want to serve ABC Market to do X, Y, and Z and this is our unique place in the marketplace of how we're going to do it.

So there's no question there's a goal component to it. There's also a duty component to it or a responsibility component that is much more prevalent today than it used to be. It used to be that 100 years ago, businesses and society were kind of intermingled it was expected. Business has been an honor society our time. We kind of shrunk that role into No, you have nothing to do with society.

That's the government's job. You just go make money. Thank you. Very much. We'll tax you and we'll take that redistributed ourselves. Businesses have a fundamental place in society. They employ people. They run factories and communities they can pollute the environment. They can choose not to pollute the environment. They can engage with stakeholders. They can think about this. So what is my place in the world becomes not just goals, make money or do whatever, but also my place in society.

And it also forces you to think not just short term, the purpose question naturally forces a long term horizon you can't say my purpose in life is ended, by the way, it's only for the next three months so that's the other piece of the puzzle. And then the last one I got, which is, by the.

Kevin: Way, the next three months is called a focus. That's not called a purpose. Right? The next three months I'm going to focus on graduating or whatever. Right.

Ranjay: Exactly. And the last component of purpose, I think, is identity. Who are we why do we come to work and so purpose is an ideal right?

Kevin: Yeah. So purpose is an ideal. I love that. So you really gotten as you describe the difference, you've talked about what you call but the title, the book Deep Purpose, but you've also shared some things here that people could look through the lens of, well, that's pretty idealistic. And yet you bring out an idea that I think is really important and I think now's the right time to talk about it, which is the idea of practical realism.

Like all of that stuff, you just say, No one's going to disagree. It's like motherhood and apple pie, like, yeah, that's all good. But how do we get out of ideal idealism and get into realism? Talk about this idea of practical realism a bit.

Ranjay: So the first thing I want to clarify is I really wanted a one word title for the book, which is purpose. And then I had to call it Deep Purpose because I found I encountered a lot of superficial purpose. Right? Smoke and mirrors and so I had to come to this place of realization. And I have a taxonomy also in the book about different levels of sort of superficial purpose.

And I had to come to this notion of deep purpose. Now, people don't confuse deep purpose. It's completely idealistic, right? It's about kind of charitable giving, and it's like, OK, how much we're going to have CSR. And, you know, it's based on the example we all love to parade is Patagonia, Ben and Jerry's, you know, a whole food and say, you know, what do go do?

Well, it all happens together. You know, it kind of comes around, goes around, and you have to find, oh, then there was the win win purpose is win win, find things. And people pushed back on that now saying that's such a copout for business because it means you'll only do good if you can make money doing it. So I have no responsibility to anybody in my community or the environment or anybody else until I find a way to make money.

If I don't. Sorry, folks do bad, right? If you can get me a really cool subsidy for all my emissions and all my pollutants in the waterways that I'm polluting out there, I'll take it. But otherwise, you know, leave me alone. And if I have, you know, everyone's here that's going to totally destroy the habitat and going to mess up the fishermen down this downstream.

We're going to get fish. Too bad. So here's what's happening today is so I actually call them practical idealists. You want idealistic because you feel that business can play a positive role in the world. But you're practical about it. My example I use actually of practical idealism is one of Gotham Green, which sells. They have figured out that there's a great business model of unutilized rooftops in urban cities and that you can actually use hydroponics and grow things that are fast boiling like letters and ovens, which a lot of spoilage happens in transit.

That's a waste, right? So if I put it on urban centers and I deliver it to the grocery store down the road, sometimes even we're in.

Kevin: The same building, right?

Ranjay: You're in the same building. I have low spoilage and I have low water utilization also. So it's good for my economics and good for the environment, you know? Wow, great business. Well, one of the things they had to struggle with the packaging of this, I turns out, you know, the worst nightmare for these idealist was to use plastic for their OK, let's do no packaging.

But then the customer pushed back and said, no, no, they won't buy without packaging customers. Somehow we like let us end up in a plastic bag or something. They tried all kinds of recyclable and, you know, packaging but none of it kept the produce fresh long enough. So you have a quote unquote, you know, better quality packaging, but it doesn't keep the produce fresh.

It goes bad. So in the end, they settled for plastic and they said, But we're going to keep an eye on packaging technologies to see when is the right moment we can change it. So it's not about perfection.

And I talk a lot about tradeoffs. I discovered that when I talk to these purpose, deep purpose leader, they said life is messy. I got to make choices. Different people want different things. Everyone wants more. Of course, customers want to pay less. Of course, employees want to get paid more. Of course, I got the environmentalist on my case.

Of course I've got my community and everyone wants more of me. And my job is to figure out what the right tradeoffs are. But they don't forget. SHAREHOLDER two.

Kevin: The balances.

Ranjay: Extension. Yeah. And I call the razor's edge that, you know, OK, how are you going to find that balance yep.

Kevin: So while we're talking about this idea of practical idealism, the question that some people are asking is, OK, so he's the professor. He can probably he's probably going to be able to tell us that, hey, if we do this, other good things happen. Obviously, we've been talking about how society and our communities benefit from all this. How does the organization benefit from this approach that you're describing?

Ranjay: Kevin, this is the this is the question this is the question. And I would even add to that, how do shareholders benefit? Right. Or the owners of the organization benefit and I think what has happened is we have confused ourselves into believing that purpose is a tax or business purpose is a proxy for stakeholder capitalism, which all wants a piece of my business, which now means I got to write checks for sustainability and this and that and the other.

Let businesses do what they do best, make money and I want to just clarify to you, the idea here is that this is good for business. And I want to tell you how right. So the first thing purpose does is forces you to have directional clarity, just like a human being, right? You're more proactive. You're thinking harder about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

It allows you to stay focused and not get confused in today's turbulent markets. You know, we don't know what to do. What are those anchor points we can use so Satya Nadella at Microsoft, explain that to me so that, you know what? Technology changes so fast. Our business is changing every day. Our strategy is changing every day. We got to have some constants in our life and purpose and culture.

Give us those constants. The second benefit you get out of a purpose business is is motivation. This increasing evidence that people care about working for a company, whether it's doing something meaningful in the world, not everybody, not everybody. I grant you that some people want to just live a whole paycheck.

Kevin: But the people that you really want to attract it, let's put it this way, the people that you really want to attract to your organization care about that.

Ranjay: Absolutely. And younger millennials are even more tuned in to this than older generations. So here you are facing a labor market. And by the way, look at what happened to Spotify last week. You got an employee rebellion right? Look at what happened to Delta Airlines. You can see employees becoming much more vocal about presenting their point of view and I think this is important.

So you do you want a more motivated workforce? And by the way, there's data showing that they compare dissatisfied, satisfied, engaged and inspired workers. And the level of productivity of inspired workers is more than 2.2 times that of a satisfied worker. So do you want an inspired workforce or a satisfied workforce? You'll call it joy. Joy. So when you say but based on that profit and telling you there's productivity gains there.

So that's and labor market gains that balance issues. So there's a motivational benefit. Then there was a directional benefit that I talked about then the third benefit is reputation. There's ample data now in marketing looking at purpose driven market. You know, and and purpose driven marketing where customers trust companies who actually believe in something so how can you enrich, enhance your brand?

That's the third benefit. And the last benefit is the least obvious is what we would call relational benefits. It turns out that that in the ecosystem of partners, suppliers, even community activists having a purpose allows you to change the conversation with them because now you start to look at it not at the transactional way, but as the relational way when they understand where you're coming from.

As one energy company CEO promises, when you have a purpose, it allows you to make demands of your stakeholders, not always be reacting to their demands. So, look, I want ample anecdotal evidence that purpose and profit are connected. There is now a holy grail of finance researchers and accounting researchers who run a measure purpose, index purpose.

Kevin: Yeah. And that's, you know, that's that's the next step that goes beyond where our conversation would be today. And certainly really even the purpose of this of this podcast. But, you know, I put a I put it a lower third up earlier, a little early. A little early, because you were talking about the statement that we don't want the purpose statement to become the next mission vision value statement.

And you said that, you know, we want to be careful. That isn't that and that and that deep purpose is more than a statement. So how you've sold us on the idea now, how do we go as an organization? How do we go beyond the statement?

Ranjay: So I don't want to trivialize writing this statement. By the way, many companies spend a lot of time writing the statements, and it's not the actual outcome, but you end up with you might have one sentence or two you're getting it took us nine months to do that. Actually, the process of coming to that statement is even more important than the statement itself.

And you can see that in so many companies I went to I went to Lego. Of course I went to Microsoft. I went to Etsy. And a number of other companies where they spent a lot of time wordsmithing the statement. But then as such, it will mean that, you know what, writing a statement is easy. What comes next is much harder.

Right now. How do you take the statement and do something with it? How do you actually embedded in your organization? How do you make it part of your strategy and decision making? How do you make this part of your hiring and promoting and developing people? How do you make this part of your processes? And day to day operating rhythm that how do we cross-reference ourselves back into our purpose?

Yeah.

Kevin: How do we use it as a how do we use it as a criteria for decision making? Right.

Ranjay: Yeah. So allocating visas, everything in rubber hits the road when you start to figure out where you're going to put money and and if purpose is not part of the conversation, then, you know, clearly you're not kind of there. Yeah. And so how do you make this but ultimately becomes, becomes part of the culture or rhythm in the organization culture.

And people start to commingle in a way that I think we have to kind of appreciate. And I think is you know, I mentioned to you Etsy earlier, Etsy is on this really well where, you know, there's some point figured out that they needed to make some hard choices and they did those once they had their business back on track.

This is the company I was going to go under. Once they had their business back on track, then the question was, how do we make purpose part of our story and how do we connect that into our strategy, into our organization, into our culture, and through our people systems, into our operating rhythm if not, then something on the wall.

It's you know, it's actually cross-referencing into everything we do. And in so.

Kevin: I love that metaphor of really action, of cross-referencing it to everything we do. And the idea of connecting it with culture is so important because you said that, you know, now if if purpose is the why and culture is the how. We need to have those hook together. Right. And so that's absolutely true. There's a section in the book that we're not going to have time to go into.

But I want to tell people, I'm talking with Reggie Gulati, the author of Deep Purple, and you go get a copy, and I hope that you'll do that. There's a chapter in here that I really love that we don't really have time to go into that talks about individual purpose, right? So if you're if you're not a senior executive, you're saying, well, this book isn't for me and not a senior executive.

First of all, it is for you. And and that chapter is a part of that piece. So while we don't have time to dove into that deeply, I'm curious if you could say anything about why the individual purpose matters. To the organizational purpose.

Ranjay: I think is especially important today. Kevin, think about what we come through, right? With that multi year pandemic that is still not over. People are throwing a lot of time at home. Pretty much everybody has seen death or heard about death or illness. You know, this is a we've had a lot of introspection happen and we were calling it the great resignation.

And then, of course, somebody called it the great upgrade that everyone wants to upgrade their job, which I totally get. There are certain occupations that have long had an unduly low wages that needed to be upgraded. But then turn around and say, OK, employees only want to get paid more because supply and demand are not calibrated together. There's more demand and learn supply.

Supply should go up. I agree. Of course I should go up, but I think we're missing something. I think it's much bigger than an upgrade. I think there's been a rethink going on. Why do I go to work? What do I want to get out of work? What does my job mean for me? And there's some great research by these two professors, one at Michigan, Jane Dutton and Amy Rosnovski, and they looked at people have three orientations towards work.

My work is a job. I do for money. My work is a career. I do it to get ahead and my or my work is a calling. I do it because it gives me meaning and I'm not saying all three are not mutually exclusive. People want to get paid to do, but what's your primary orientation to them? Why do I go to and I think I would urge everyone to think about the following.

We should all expect more from our lives and we should expect more from our jobs.

Kevin: Well, and if we get to this place, you were saying earlier about even if even if we can get to engaged, but certainly we can get to inspired, then that's going to change how people feel. And in fact, you make the case in the book that sometimes it's it's the organization that can help people find their personal or individual purpose.

Even though that might not be the reason for doing it. It's a it's a glorious additional outcome that can happen. What's before we start to round out here and I ask you a couple of other questions, sort of not about the book what else didn't I ask that you wish I would have or what's something we didn't talk about that you think we should.

Ranjay: I think I want to go back to the last question. What's it mean for me and how can I? I think what's happened is there's been a progression over time. In the last hundred years where we started to compartmentalize our lives. We call it work life balance.

There's work, and then there is my life and I live my life after 5 p.m. and on the weekends, and the rest of time is work. Now, my mother my mother, who was a fashion designer in her time, used to say something to me, which was Ranjay. I never I my wish for you is you never have to work a day in your life.

And as a first time I heard it, I thought, she's telling me that she's making so much money that I never have to work a day in my life.

Kevin: They show me the books, Mom.

Ranjay: Yeah. And maybe she was saying that. I don't know. But what she was really saying was what she experienced. She never thought of what she did as work.

Kevin: Yep.

Ranjay: It gave her so much purpose and meaning that it was never experienced as a work. In fact, she was willing to work crazy hours for it because she wasn't trying to sell clothes. She was trying to bring heightened sensibility in connecting rural Indian women who had very sophisticated color and taste to the Western world. She was an anthropologist, and she saw this view in the Western world that village women are primitive in some way.

It was completely wrong. So in her ideal, that's what she was doing and she was excited about that. So she'd go to a village and see some beautiful design. Is it? Oh my God, I'm sure I can do something with this and I can take it here, I can put it on a dress or I can put it on a skirt and I'll think about it this way.

How do you bring meaning into what you do? And I think it's so easy to crowd that out in our lives and live compartmentalized lives and I my wish for everybody is coherence. In this same study, they looked at janitors in hospitals in New York, and one third of the janitors said My work is a calling. And the answer was, I don't go to work to clean.

I go to work to help people. I get to make a difference. Prison guards you know, they've looked at it in all kinds of contexts. It's not just the old janitor in Nassau saying, Mr. President, I'm here to put a man on the moon. How do we create that kind of inspiration in our lives where my work gives me a sense of pride and meaning in my everyday existence?

That's my real wish. And I really hope that business leaders and us, we should demand more of our jobs. And if not, we should reframe as this research called recraft, it's called job crafting. How do I change how I think about what I do?

Kevin: Well, there's a number of things that you've said in this conversation, and this won't go live. And we don't know as a podcast, you know, it's evergreen. We don't know when people will listen. And I can tell you as we're having this conversation in the middle of February of 2022, that we're at a we're at a huge inflection point about how we all view work and the connection between work and life.

And all of that's in flux right now. And, and all of this conversation is completely relevant to that to that conversation. So I appreciate this on this conversation on multiple levels, Roger. And so I've got a couple of questions I ask everybody before we finish. And this first one, I think since we've just been talking about work life balance or as one of the members of my team says, Kevin, we should call it life work balance.

If we're going to talk about balance, what do you do, sir, for fun?

Well, OK, it doesn't work to be that hard. And give me that. No, no.

Ranjay: Look, the easiest my most fun thing is to hang out with my family. You know, I have two kids. One of them is working now. So whenever I get to see him, I'm thrilled. And then I have one at home and she's in high school. And so it's simple things, you know, I'll go out for a walk with her in the snowstorm, which I did two weeks ago, or just hang with her and watch a movie or we do a puzzle together or play ping pong.

So I love to do that. In my past life, I used to love to ski, which I haven't done in the last two to three years, but I hope to get back into that again. Yeah. So and I love to see my friends, so keep it simple. And my wife, of course, keeps me on my toes as well.

So I love to kind of spend time and and interact with her. She's written her own book. And so while I was writing mine, she was writing hers and we were having heated debates back and forth about what we were both working on. So those are my simple pleasures.

Kevin: So since we're talking about books, another question I like to ask smart people that I meet, and so I do that here is what are you reading? And I know I told you I was going to ask you this and you you scurried off for a second. So so what are you reading these days?

Ranjay: So first of all, I've been reading, of course, my wife's book, which is not going to be out for another nine months or ten months, but and but that we can talk about another time. I'm reading actually two books one is by a college classmate, a friend of mine, and he has spent most of his career studying demographics.

And the book is called Demographics Unravel. And he's looking at how population, demographics, age, distribution, gender, race, ethnicity, how demographic tells us so much about the world we live in. And yet we don't really look at it. So I think it's a very powerful book. And then I'm reading a book by another colleague of mine it's called Why Startups Fail, and it's by Tom Eisenman.

The first one is by Allen Roy, and the second one is by Tom Eisenman. It's called Why Startups Fade A Fascinating Account into How Do We Understand Big Failure, like why these amazing, organized, iconic companies fail and what can we learn? So two books that I feel really excited me right now and I'm enjoying them.

Kevin: Perfect. So where can we learn more about this book? I'll hold it up here. Where do you want to point people? How do you want whatever you want to tell people about how they can get connected with you or get the book?

Ranjay: The easiest way to learn more about the book and found. I have a series of videos I'm putting out summarizing the book on purpose dot net. So it's a website I made for the book. It's for deep purpose dot net. I also have a CEO series. I'm about to interview live two CEOs from every continent on the planet.

Who I believe have understood how to tackle purpose but also how to tackle the crazy times we're in right now with COVID and so I'm interviewing CEOs from prominent organizations in Europe, the US, from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa, and that's also on the website. So there's a tab called CEO Speed Talks, and anybody is welcome to join, if you like.

These are inspiring leaders.

Kevin: Deep purpose dot net everybody. So now so thank you for that, Roger. And thank you so much for being here. Before we go and before we say we sign off together, I need to ask the question I ask all of you every single week and that is this. Now what what are you going to do with all of this?

It's one thing to take this in. It's one thing to maybe even take some notes it's another thing to take some action. The question would be what action are you going to take? And so whether it's thinking differently about purpose, whether that's thinking about how to connect the purpose that you have with your culture, whatever it might be, whether it's getting a copy of the book, the purpose, whatever it might be, I hope that you will take that thought seriously and you move from saying that's that's what I'd like to do to that's what I'm going to do.

I hope you'll do that. And Ranjay. Thanks so much again for being here. It's such a pleasure to have you. I love the book. I'm so excited for us to have this conversation. And I'm so glad we did.

Ranjay: And thank you so much. It is a real pleasure to be here with you. And I love the conversation. So thank you for that and for your interest in this work.

Kevin: All right, everybody. You know what this means. This means we're done today, but we're not done. We'll be back next week. With another episode of the Remarkable Leadership podcast. Thanks, everybody.

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