Page 12 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

PREFACE

conversation and preoccupations of the evening were superfi-
cial and sterile. We both learned once again that meaning is
tied less to belongings and more to emotional bonds, a sense
of purpose, and using one’s skills to serve the needs of others.
In organizations as well, meaning and abundance are
more about what we do with what we have than about what
we have to begin with or what we accumulate. They are
more about finding the resources to deal with our challenges
than about having unlimited resources to make work easy
or effortless. Work will always be work—sometimes monot-
onous or routine, sometimes stressful to the max—but we
believe work can still contribute more than just money to our
lives. Leaders can develop the resources to make employees
work harder and to make work work for employees. There
is a strong business case for helping people find meaning
at work. As employees find meaning, they contribute to the
broadest purposes for which organizations exist: creating
value for customers, investors, and communities. This book
distills from a broad range of literature and research a set of
resources leaders can use in that process.
As we have worked with college students and young
missionaries, we have been infected with the rising genera-
tion’s passion for purpose around both ideas and ideals. As
we have worked with mature adults, we have learned that
meaning seekers abound at all life stages. We have seen that
people find meaning not only in their personal lives but also
through the organizations where they learn, worship, social-
ize, and play. Meaning can be discovered in friendships,
families, neighborhoods, religious communities, schools,
service clubs . . . and work.
On a more personal level, we seem to be constantly ask-
ing ourselves, “What will we do when we grow up?” When

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