Page 30 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE CASE FOR MEANING

who consistently offer employees both economic well-being
and an abundance of meaning and purpose.
In both lean and prosperous times, an organization’s val-
ues are tested and forged, setting the stage for the future.
Meaning is shaped or dissipated. Loyalties are won or lost.
Talent and skill are honed or abandoned. Creativity and
problem-solving skill are developed or undermined. And
future sustainability is either ensured or threatened.
We need abundant organizations in deficit-dominated
contexts that challenge our existing sense of meaning and
growth-dominated contexts that give rise to expansion.
Even when the world economy improves, the ghosts of
our “psychological recession” haunt us. Financial chal-
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lenges are embedded in larger trends that permeate society.
In downturns people feel an increasing sense of malaise,
anomie, and isolation that robs them of meaning and direc-
tion. Crises in financial markets echo the crises in personal
lives and social movements—crises that, almost by defini-
tion, undercut our ability to make sense of our lives and
figure out what to do next. Crises sabotage the daily routines
that have grown out of our values, beliefs, and past experi-
ence. Crises threaten the assumptions that we hold without
even realizing it about what life means in both good times
and in bad. In brief, crises increase our sense of malaise,
anomie, isolation, or deficit, robbing us all of meaning and
hope.
Frankl’s why and how questions about meaning apply in
both bad and good markets, at work and at home, in domes-
tic settings as well as in organizations that span the globe.
Good times can temporarily distract us from such questions,
but the questions always come back around. As Frankl sug-
gests, the search for meaning is more about how we think

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