Page 49 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

When the executive team first became involved in the
turnaround, they had a clear intellectual agenda for over-
coming what was wrong with the bank’s operations. As
they began to look at transformation, however, their agenda
shifted to building what was right—abundance thinking and
an emergent emotional agenda. In many ways, transforma-
tion is more difficult than turnaround. In a turnaround, a
pending financial crisis demands attention and thus dictates
behavior. In a transformation, greater emphasis must be
put on creating meaning to capture imagination and shape
future behavior.
Statistics on the national economy or the corporate cash
flow focus our attention on the deficits that dominate our
lives, including deficits in time and money resources. But
other deficits can be even more crucial to our sense of well-
being—deficits in purpose, satisfying connections to other
people, challenging work, resilience, and delight. Such defi-
cits can add up to a deficit of meaning. Overcoming these
deficits builds the agenda of abundance.

Discovering Meaning

Abundance is not found in circumstances or events—in
how big a raise we got or how many people report to us.
Abundance is found in the value we place on those events
and the way we interpret their impact on us. Meaning is not
inherent in events; it is made by people. This is the good
news and the not-so-good news. Good news: the meaning
of our lives is not controlled by what happens—as Frankl
discovered, we can find purpose, value, and also happiness

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