Personifying Purpose
Speech given at the Haas School of Business, University of California
When I was 15 years old, I was at the peak of my career - as an athlete.
I’d just gotten drafted by an elite hockey team that was in a respected league near where I grew up.
And even though I’d been in the role of Captain on just about every team I’d played on, this particular team already had a captain.
He also happened to be the coach’s son.
His name was Rob Pietras.
Now, a lot of the kids on the team had known each other for years, and had grown up skating together and playing together. But when you’re a 15 year old boy, playing on a team of 15 other 15 year-old boys, you’ve got something to prove, especially when you’ve only been there 15 minutes.
I came in there wondering how long it would take for me to become the captain.
But there was something I saw, something I felt, about the authenticity of Rob’s leadership. The way his energy kept the team focused. The way he’d play when he was away from the puck. He actually made me, and a lot of other people on the team, a better player.
And as I built a relationship with Rob, he’d eventually share some of his vulnerabilities. Turns out having your dad behind the bench during games and on the ice during practices isn’t always a circumstance that lets you be your full adolescent self. And Rob had also had increasing worries about whether he was improving as fast as he’d wanted to.
I found that talking to him about these things, helping him a little bit through his challenges, was actually motivating me tremendously. I happily took on a role as Rob’s Assistant Captain. And I learned to help make him an even better leader, a better player, a better teammate.
Our team gelled, and we never looked back. With the score of the 1993 Michigan State Championship Game tied 1-1 in the first period, I threw a pass across the ice to a striding Rob, and he skated into the zone and scored a goal that would prove to be the game-winner. Rob and I skated a trophy around the ice of Joe Louis Arena that night, his jersey with a C on it, mine with an A, all having arrived at the same final finish line at the very same time.
And a big reason it happened is that I discovered a new niche, a new role - as a leader supporting another leader.
A few years later, when I was at Northwestern, I lived in a dorm called a Residential College that had a student government. We had a budget, we had a charter, and we tried to do important things. And we had a President! When elections came for second-year student government, I knew my classmate Josh Gershonson needed to be the next one. I’d never met anyone so passionate about the random combination of intellect, empathy, and … procedure. If you met Josh for 30 seconds, you’d know he was a Dorm President.
But Josh did struggle with a few things. Despite his deep empathy, he didn’t always have the patience to hear everyone’s concerns and factor them into his decisions. And he wasn’t always great at developing relationships with the faculty, the staff, and the grad students that would be essential for us to do what we wanted to do.
What I felt called to do was be Josh’s Vice President. I wanted to help him out behind the scenes. To help him build empathy. To grow confidence. To learn how to manage relationships more creatively. And help him succeed.
Josh ran for President, and he won. I ran for VP, and won. And it was so much fun. Here I was, for a whole school year - coaching, guiding, helping … working with Josh get better, and of course, upping my own game.
A few summers later I read the book by the late Steven Covey, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” The habits are good. The frameworks are even better. But it wasn’t the habits or the frameworks that resonated most deeply with me. It was the idea that someone could have a career helping other leaders (it’s called consulting, but I didn’t know it at the time!) Reading that book on an Alaska airlines flight from Sacramento to Seattle in the summer of 1996, with Enya playing on my Sony Discman filling my ears, I knew I wanted to try a career in consulting.
When I look back now at 15+ years in consulting, with my Enya having gone from Disc to MP3 to Spotify, the rewarding through-line across all the experiences I had - whether it was at a big firm, at Prophet Brand Strategy, or here at Haas working on client projects in Kellie’s class…it wasn’t the experience we put into market, or the brand that we created… what resonated with me most deeply was the idea that I had a hand in advancing people’s careers … working behind the scenes to make them more successful … coaching younger employees in the firm … helping them do them.
At Prophet, where I worked for over 12 years, we talked about being an Indispensable Ally to our clients, and to one another within the firm. And that phrase, Indispensable Ally, turns out to crystallize what’d guided me for two and a half decades in my life as an athlete, in my career, and at home.
As a Brand guy, at some point I realized I needed to put pen to paper and write down my Purpose. It’s the kind of thing that can be pretty confounding, and in all honesty, I did wrestle with it for a while.
But as I thought about the times in my life when I’d been happiest, when I’d had the greatest impact, and when I’d learned the most, I came back to Rob Pietras. I came back to Josh Gershenson. I came back to my favorite clients. To the people at Prophet and Qualtrics that I’d coached.
And so I articulate my purpose in very simple language. I even have it on my website to make it real. “To help leaders lead.” That’s it. Everything it needs to be, and not one thing more. There’s nothing more, and nothing less, that I feel I’ve been put on this earth to do.
That leader could be a very visible person who’s leading in an explicit sense, like my CMO now. Or it can be a future leader, like both of my daughters. As long as it’s someone with the ambition and ability to create change. Helping leaders lead.
There’s two things I’d like to ask of you. One is something that someone in the audience today once advised me to do. Get out a piece of paper, and think about and write up your purpose.
We’re in a unique moment in history where employees hold a lot of cards, and as you think about the next 5-10 years of your career, you have cultural and societal tailwinds that we haven’t seen in the economy in our lifetimes. You’ve gotta take advantage of them and sail with them.
But just like starting off a long journey with your compass pointed even a few degrees off will land you thousands of miles away from your intended destination, being incoherent or incomplete about your purpose will take you to places you’ll struggle to make sense of or be happy in. So take the time to reflect on and articulate your purpose.
The second thing I’d ask is that, as you work on this, you go back and look at your life as a series of clues. Even if you struggle with the words, I promise that there’s some pattern, some repeated series of experiences, some evidence in your past - like the stories I reflected on today - that’ll provide you clues as to what your purpose is.
Purpose can be hard to articulate, but I promise you, it’s been there all along.
One of our values at Haas is Students Always. I encourage you to always be a Student of Yourself, and to use what you learn to go do the meaningful things in this world that you, and only you, were meant to do.
Thank you.