What Connects "Built for People" with "Purpose & Work"
"What job does your job do for you?" That's the question at the center of my new book, Purpose and Work. Here's the foreword:
When I was writing Built for People I have to be honest, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. “Writing a book is like writing ten blogs” was something that crossed my mind quite a few times in the early days (very foolish). It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that writing a book is a lot more difficult than writing 10 blogs, or, honestly, maybe even more challenging than writing one-hundred blogs. While I was writing Built for People there were many chapters, ideas, tangents, interviews, thoughts, and paragraphs that were sent to the proverbial scrap heap, very likely never to be seen again. However, one idea that kept swirling around my head was the idea of the relationship with purpose and the employment “products” we’re building, particularly in modern capitalism and the strange times we found ourselves in at the time of Built for People‘s publication in 2023.
The years surrounding 2021 exposed a profound tension between capitalism and purpose that became impossible to ignore. As the pandemic forced a global reckoning with work, we witnessed a striking dissonance: companies proclaimed their commitment to purpose and employee wellbeing while simultaneously conducting mass layoffs via video calls. Industry giants spoke eloquently about their world-changing missions in the same breath as they announced record profits amid widespread hurt and anguish. Many of us in Management, HR and People Operations found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of crafting purpose statements by morning and processing terminations by afternoon. This era laid bare a fundamental contradiction at the heart of our modern workplace narrative – the expectation that profit-driven entities could authentically prioritize purpose when economic pressures mounted. As millions reassessed their relationship with work during the Great Resignation, it became clear that the corporate purpose playbook wasn’t just failing; it was actively breeding cynicism. Employees weren’t rejecting purpose itself; they were rejecting the inauthenticity of company purpose as a corporate performance.
I was reminded of Studs Terkel’s profound observation from his groundbreaking oral history Working: “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor.” Terkel captured this truth in 1974, yet half a century later, we’re still struggling to reconcile this fundamental human need with the realities of modern capitalism. The pandemic didn’t create this tension, it merely accelerated and exposed what was already there, forcing us to confront questions we’d been avoiding about the true nature of meaning in work.
My journey into these questions wasn’t purely academic. Growing up in rural Queensland, Australia my father drove trucks across Australia’s vast landscapes, and my mother gradually climbed from secretarial work to professional roles in the mining industry. For them, and for many of the communities I’ve been part of, work wasn’t just about paychecks, it was about what it could do for our family, contribution, and their place in the world. Yet somewhere along the way, as work became more abstract, more digital, more disconnected from tangible outcomes, I felt I had witnessed a loss of something essential about this relationship. It’s hard for me to reconcile this personal evolution at times, as I feel incredibly privileged to live a life in the city I live in, doing work that I find incredibly intellectually challenging, while remembering where I came from and the world of work I grew up understanding. There is a dignity in working close to the land, close to your customers, and close to your community; but as the world has evolved and globalised, I’ve found myself asking questions my parents perhaps never asked themselves. I’m not sure if my parents would have found the same kinds of dissatisfaction those I interviewed for this book have sometimes felt had my parents lived similar lives, or even if my folks asked themselves the same kinds of questions in silence but never out loud.
These nagging thoughts eventually became this book, or at least, the ideas behind this book. There was still so much more work to do. As I spoke with more leaders, employees, and organisations about building better workplaces, I kept encountering the same paradox: companies investing heavily in purpose initiatives that employees viewed with increasing cynicism. Something wasn’t adding up. The more organisations pushed purpose from the top down, the more purpose seemed to evaporate from the bottom up.
The research process itself has been transformative. I’ve had conversations with people across industries and roles, from C-suite executives to frontline workers, from people who’d found deep fulfilment in their careers, to those who’d walked away entirely. What struck me was the universality of the hunger for meaning, regardless of position or pay grade. The paths to finding this commitment varied wildly, often contradicting the neat narratives presented in leadership books and corporate purpose statements I’d ‘grown up’ with in the professional sense. There were many times I left an interview with more questions than answers, and many more times I found myself quite tired of hearing my own internal narrative as I attempted to unpick their answers, as much for you as a reader as for myself as an author and practitioner. When I began interviewing people about their relationship with purpose at work, I expected to find clear patterns (foolish, yet again — you’d think I would learn!) — certain industries or roles that naturally provided more meaning, or specific purpose initiatives that consistently succeeded. Instead, I discovered something far more complex and personal. For some, purpose came through deep connection with colleagues; for others, through mastery of a craft; for still others, through alignment with organisational mission. There was no one-size-fits-all approach, no magic purpose statement or framework that could transform work for everyone.
What began as an exploration of a relatively “simple” theme (foolish, foolish!) soon revealed itself as a much deeper question about our fundamental relationship with work. I discovered that the way we’ve been thinking about purpose—as something companies can manufacture and deliver to employees—was fundamentally flawed. This realization led me down unexpected paths, from the history of how our relationship with work has evolved over centuries to cutting-edge research on meaning-making in the modern workplace.
The timing of this research and writing coincided with another profound shift in how we think about work: the emergence of sophisticated AI systems capable of performing increasingly complex knowledge, creative, and analytical work. As these technologies force us to reconsider what makes human work unique and valuable, the question of purpose takes on new urgency. If machines can write code, analyze data, and even generate creative content, what distinctive value do humans bring? This technological revolution offers both challenge and opportunity—pushing us to dig deeper into what truly makes work meaningful beyond mere productivity or output.
Like both books I’ve now written (and one of the most joyful and enlightening parts of the Author’s Journey), writing this book has reshaped my own thinking about purpose at work, and without sounding too grandiose, has changed some of my thinking about the path of my own life. Where I once saw purpose as a product to be optimised, I now understand it as a collective journey to be undertaken. Where I once focused primarily on how companies could articulate purpose better, I now see the critical importance of creating spaces where purpose can be discovered collectively.
This shift in perspective hasn’t made me any less passionate about building great workplace experiences. If anything, it’s deepened my conviction that the employee experience matters enormously. But it’s changed how I think about that experience; less as something designed for employees and more as something created with them.
In many ways, this book is the natural evolution of the ideas I explored in Built for People. It takes the product mindset I advocated there and extends it to address one of the most complex ‘problem-statements’ in the modern workplace: how can we feel and develop authentic purpose in a world increasingly skeptical of corporate purpose-washing.
The structure of this book reflects this journey. We begin by exploring how our relationship with work has evolved historically, examining the forces that shaped our current expectations about purpose. We then dive into the modern workplace, revealing both the promise and pitfalls of corporate purpose initiatives. Next, we explore the crossroads many of us face in our careers, as we reconsider and sometimes reinvent our relationship with work. Finally, we move toward practical approaches for creating environments where authentic purpose can flourish—not through prescription, but through co-creation.
Wendell Berry reminds us that “The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think,” the field still needs tending, the community still needs feeding. Meaning in work is found when it serves the life of the world. Throughout this exploration, I’ve been continually drawn back to this essential truth: purpose emerges most naturally when we connect our daily efforts to the lives they touch and the communities they serve. In our increasingly complex and abstract economy, finding these connections requires new approaches, new structures, and new conversations. Authenticity is a word that has appeared over and over. This desire for authentic purpose reflects a fundamental human need to align our external actions with our internal values—to feel that what we do reflects who we are and why we are here on this earth. Yet authenticity in the workplace is extraordinarily difficult to achieve, particularly because of the inherent power dynamics that structure our professional relationships. For leaders, the challenge is uniquely complex. They’re caught in a paradox: expected to be vulnerable and authentic while simultaneously maintaining the authority and certainty their roles demand. Several executives I interviewed described feeling trapped in a performance, worried that showing genuine doubt or uncertainty might undermine their effectiveness or even their position. I myself have felt the pull of authenticity and career, something I know is felt more acutely in folks from marginalised communities or who don’t see themselves frequently represented. This creates a particular kind of organisational doublespeak, where authenticity is celebrated in corporate values statements but often subtly punished in practice. Employees quickly learn to perform a carefully calibrated version of “authenticity” that doesn’t threaten existing power structures. Most fundamentally, it means recognizing that authentic purpose can only flourish in environments where power is used to amplify voices rather than direct them.
My hope is that this book offers both a critical perspective on how we’ve approached purpose in the past and a practical path forward for creating workplaces where meaning can flourish authentically. Not by manufacturing purpose, but by creating the conditions where it can emerge naturally through connection, contribution, and collective meaning-making.
While on his podcast, Work for Humans, my friend (and author of the introduction to this book) Dart Lindsley, asked me, “What job does your job do for you?” a question which, at the time and despite all of my big talk about the productising work, had stumped me… and even now after writing an entire second book with this topic front of mind, I find it complex to get a succinct answer for myself. In writing this I wanted to explore my own relationship with purpose, work, and the job my job does for me, while also giving some meaningful frameworks for you to think about and use to break away from the dissonance and longing we can feel when relating our own personal sense of purpose and fulfilment to work.
In short, the job my job does for me is to connect me to wonderful new people, encourages me to explore new ideas, and offers a life yielding an abundance of joy which may have otherwise remained unreachable to someone of my background. While you read this book I’d love you to not only be thinking about how these principals, frameworks, and case studies apply to your role as a manager, a leader, or a people-professional; but also that you take some time to ask yourself, “what job is my job doing for me?”
Sources and Further Reading
Studs Terkel’s oral history Working (1974): “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread…” Terkel, S. (1974) Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books.
Wendell Berry: “The world doesn’t stop because you are in love or in mourning or in need of time to think…” Berry, W. (2012) This Day: Collected & New Sabbath Poems. Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint.