Page 73 - How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win

THE WHY OF WORK

images, aware that others are out to get him, and spooked by
his own instinctive capacities, he is horrified by the conclu-
sion pressing upon him: he must be a killer for hire. Bourne
has all the skills of a cold and highly trained assassin, but his
moral values are deeply offended by such a possibility.
Jason Bourne is a fictional character: a highly skilled
operative for an imaginary secret government agency gone
bad, an agency that recruited him for his talent and patrio-
tism, an agency he turns against and turns in as he realizes
its corrupt leadership has deceived him. His predicament
provides an interesting reminder that our identity does not
consist only of the name we use, the stories we remember,
or the people we know. Our identity is grounded in how we
instinctively use our skills in the service of our deepest val-
ues. Although our lives do not play out to driving rhythms
in tightly edited chase scenes, each of us is trying to figure
out who we are, to analyze what we do well and whether it
serves our deepest values.
At both a personal and an organizational level, a mean-
ingful life is one that expresses who we are as articulately
and honestly as possible, both with our words and through
our actions. Who we are is not just about what we can do;
it is about what we love and what we hate, what we desire
and what we fear, what we know and what we are still trying
to figure out. It is not enough for Jason Bourne to be good
at what he does, even in the service of his own survival. He
needs to know what end his skills serve, and he yearns for
that end to be something he deeply believes in. When his
institutional identity clashes with his personal identity, even
when he cannot remember exactly why, his loyalty is lost
and the institution he once served becomes the enemy.

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