Hubert Joly: “The world as it currently functions cannot continue”

Leaders League: In The Heart of Business, you explain how the relationship between a company and its purpose has evolved in recent years. What was the genesis of this book?
It was the fruit of a long road. Three decades ago, I was approached by three monks who wanted me to write an article on the essence of work for a theological and philosophical review. In going through the references to work in the Bible, I discovered an apparent dichotomy: work was either framed as punishment for those who had offended God, or it was seen as a pleasure or vocation.

But the underlying theme was similar: that work was a way for a man to give purpose to his existence. Because within the hearts of men there is a universal desire: to help others. Work can be a way to accomplish this. There’s a quote from the poet Khalil Gibran that I often cite, “Work is love made visible.”

Arresting words. You also draw inspiration from personal experience.
Back when I worked at McKinsey, one of my clients, the boss of Honeywell Bull, Jean-Marie Descarpentries, declared that the primary purpose of a company was not to make money. There were, in fact, three main imperatives: a human imperative, a business imperative (clients must be kept happy) and a financial imperative. In business, we often lose sight of this fact, preferring to focus on financial results above all else, but this is like a doctor only being concerned with a patient’s temperature, not their overall health.

My own road-to-Damascus moment came when I was at Universal. I had made it all the way to the top of my profession, yet I wasn’t fulfilled. There was no joy, no sense of meaning to the work I was doing. Call it a mid-life crisis, it made me go away and rethink what I was doing with my life. I came to the conclusion that I could find purpose in my work only by dedicating it to the common good and improving people’s lives. The quest for individual purpose goes hand in hand with the quest for a company’s purpose.

It this not the case nowadays?
The world as it currently functions cannot continue. We are facing a healthcare crisis, an economic crisis, a societal crisis, a ticking environmental timebomb… things have got to change! It was Albert Einstein who said, “madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

We cannot run a company if the planet is on fire. And since the general public’s faith in the ability of governments to do something about these issues has diminished, it is up to companies to do their best to respond to what’s going on in the world outside their four walls.

What makes a great leader?
A leader is like a gardener who knows that in order for seeds to grow they need to be sown in fertile ground. To do that a leader must unlearn what they have learned about management and bonuses. Research has shown that financial objectives actually hinder performance. Contrary to popular belief, the carrot and stick approach does not work – if you treat people like an ass they will behave like asses.

A lot of companies these days trip over themselves to advertise their purpose. Big mistake!

Everyone needs to connect with the thing that they are passionate about in life, in order to bring meaning to their work. It’s important to create genuine bonds between people, foster a culture of self-reliance and create an environment where people feel safe and nurtured. You need to be a coach. And for this you have to be authentic and show vulnerability and empathy. This is the opposite of the larger-than-life corporate leader as super-hero persona.

In your book, you cite a poll from the ADP Research Institute carried out in 19 countries which found that only 16% of employers were completely invested in their work. The cost of this epidemic of apathy, as you put it, has been put at $7 trillion. How does this make you feel?
I can relate on a personal level. When I was around 16, I had a summer job putting price-stickers on pots of jam in a hypermarket to be able to afford a bike. It was not rewarding work, the most menial of tasks.

No manager ever looked twice at me or took an interest in what I was doing. After a couple of weeks in the job I got hit by a forklift and had to go on sick leave. I was getting paid to do nothing, It was paradise! I said to myself, “I need to remember this for the rest of my life!”

What if, instead of counting the hours ‘til home-time, staff, especially those in direct contact with customers, came to work with a fire in their belly and a desire to do great things? If you could make staff feel that way, imagine how it would change a company for the better.   

How does this story apply to Best Buy?
At the time when I became the director of the group, the common consensus was that we were done-for, because of the growth of Amazon mainly, but in fact, the reason for our struggles was that the quality of customer service at Best Buy had gone down the toilet, because our retail staff had little engagement.

After working diligently for a few years to change the culture, a story found its way back to me, of a young boy in Florida who’d been given a dinosaur for Christmas, and he came to our store with his mother because the dinosaur had gotten sick – its head had become detached from its body – and the boy wanted to make it better.

Two Blue Shirts [employees] took the toy and went behind the counter to perform surgery to fix it. To an adult’s eyes it was obvious that all they’d done was replace the broken toy with an identical new one, but imagine the wonder in the young boy’s eyes who thought that his dinosaur had been magically repaired.

Do you think that Best Buy had a staff memo on how to behave in case of ‘sick’ toys? Of course not! The desire to spread a little happiness came from those staff members. If management did anything at all, it was making them feel they had the freedom to respond in such a way.

What does this anecdote say about the company at that time?
I leant of this story at a time when Best Buy sales were increasing, but with no discernable pattern to account for the growth. That’s when it hit me, and I said to myself, “we are winning back customers because we’ve succeeded in creating an environment where 100,000 people really want to make others happy.”

How would you define purpose as it pertains to a company?
The mission of a company, its purpose, lies at the intersection of a four-circle Venn diagram. What does the world need, what makes our company unique, which issues are we passionate about and how can we make money? Authenticity and credibility are key – it’s a difficult recipe to get right.  

In your career, how were you able to have success in getting staff to understand your idea of purpose.
A lot of companies these days trip over themselves to advertise their purpose. Big mistake! Imagine if you were on the floor at Best Buy and management came down one day and said to you. “Our company’s purpose is to enrich people’s lives through technology.” You would probably have thought to yourself “That’s great and all, but what exactly am I supposed to do?” It’s not as simple as telling people what the purpose of a company is. You also need to make this purpose the cornerstone of your strategy and makes sure that everyone has a stake in it.

Rather than calling in the PR team to craft a message, one of our teams thought we should organize training sessions with staff instead. During these sessions we got together in small groups to talk about our lives and tell stories about a friend who inspired us.

In one of the groups a young woman explained that she was coming out of a difficult relationship and that Best Buy had become her family. All of a sudden, I stopped seeing her as an employee and thought of her instead as a human being.