What is the Purpose Revolution and Why it Matters

What is the coming Purpose Revolution and why does it matter to you, your team members and your customers? Learn more about Dr. Izzo's book The Purpose Revolution: drjohnizzo.com/the-purpose-re...
I'm Dr. John Izzo and today I'd like to talk to you about the Purpose
Revolution, what it is and why it's so important for you as a leader and for your business. Now I believe the Purpose Revolution will be the single greatest opportunity and perhaps the single greatest threat to almost any business in our time.
Now, the Purpose Revolution, simply put, is an emerging set of expectations among employees, customers and investors all over the world to have their self-oriented needs met but at the same time to feel that their working, their buying and their investing is leveraging social good in the world.
For employees it means I want all the things I've always wanted: a great career, promotions and opportunities to grow, to be recognized and appreciated, to have a good salary but I also want meaning and purpose in my work. In fact, 50 percent of Millennials globally say they would gladly take a pay cut to work in a job that had meaning for them and for a company whose values they believed in.
For customers, we want everything we've always wanted: we want quality, we want value, we want a product that excites us, we want great service but at the same time we want to feel that our buying is good for people and good for the planet. We want to feel we're not doing any harm with our buying and increasingly even more we want to leverage social good. We want to buy from companies that we believe in with upwards of 80% of global consumers saying that matters to them and almost 40% who are regularly acting on buying and avoiding companies they believe in or don't believe in.
Finally, even investors have caught the Purpose Revolution virus and increasingly investors are saying, “Hey, I want a great return on my money but at the same time I want to feel I'm leveraging good in my buying. I want to feel like by investing in this company I'm actually doing something good for the world.”
Now the really interesting thing about the Purpose Revolution is that it’s global, it's growing and it's happening very quickly. In fact, interestingly one of the fastest places for the Purpose Revolution in terms of growth is in the developing world where the rising middle class is saying a paycheck and a product are not enough, I want more. So it’s global and it’s global across all generations but especially among the Millennials, a young idealistic generation who say, “Look, I’d rather live in my parents’ basement than work in a job that has no meaning for me” and the aging baby boomers who are at the end of their careers saying, “Hey look, I've made enough money now. I want to make sure at the end of my career I do something that really has meaning and is exciting for me.”
And finally it's happening quickly, it's growing so fast year after year that within a few years those companies that are not excited and activating purpose within their company are going to be irrelevant and left behind.
Now finally, one last thing is that the Purpose Revolution is a great way to differentiate in an early age of disruption. Increasingly, it's so difficult to differentiate by price or quality or product because pretty much everyone will imitate whatever you do in all three of those categories. But connecting to your story as a company, believing in your company, believing in your purpose is tremendous glue and research shows that those customers and employees who really engage with your purpose are more loyal for longer periods of time than for almost any other reason, for almost any other reason that they might be loyal to you. So the Purpose Revolution is global it's growing and it's coming fast. Are you ready for it?