Page 21 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

Viktor Frankl was a budding psychologist following in
the footsteps of Freud when World War II erupted. Frankl
survived three years in a Nazi concentration camp, but upon
his liberation he found his family, home, and writings gone.
Before the war Frankl had been developing a system of psy-
chotherapy based on our need for meaning. Once he was
incarcerated, his previous philosophical speculations about
what helps people heal and cope were no longer just inter-
esting cerebral playthings; they were tested in the fire of a
dreadful and lengthy ordeal. Frankl’s book Man’s Search for
Meaning, which has sold more than nine million copies,
has become a classic. Against the backdrop of horrific adver-
sity, his insistence on the possibility—even the necessity—of
finding meaning in life becomes deeply credible. After all,
adversity generally disrupts our sense of meaning and robs
life of what previously gave it sense and purpose. In troubled
times our search for meaning becomes both more diffi-
cult and more compelling. Frankl quotes the philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to live can bear
with almost any how.”
He or she who has a why to work can bear with almost
any how as well. Obviously, people find meaning in many
settings—in the privacy of homes and the expanses of
nature, in churches, ballparks, and community centers, in
family and friendship circles. But work takes the lion’s share
of our time and energy. Most of us spend more time at work
than at play, at family gatherings, at religious meetings, or
at hobbies. The organizations in which we labor are thus a
primary setting not only for accomplishing assignments but
also for finding an abiding sense of meaning in life. Work is
a universal setting in which to pursue our universal search
for meaning.

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