Hi. Welcome to work on purpose. How working for what matters most changes everything. I'm Vic Strecker and I'm a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. I'm also the founder of Kumanu a company that helps employees and organizations find greater purpose, becoming more purposeful every day. How about if we start with a little introduction. Let's get in our time machine for a second and let's rev up that time machine and go backward in time. Maybe, I don't know. What do you think? Maybe about 500 years or so. Let's go back to an agrarian community where things were quite different when it came to work and when it came to purpose. Let's go back to actual paintings from that time by Bruegel. This is a painting of real people, I'm sure, who were butchers. Here's another painting of real people who are gardeners. You see what they were all doing. They all had purposes, what they were doing and very likely, they were prescribed these purposes. Very likely, they were basically given purposes maybe at birth, what they were going to be, whether they're going to be musicians or restaurant tours, whether they're going to be pharmacists or physicians or other kinds of people, whatever their role was, usually, it was prescribed fairly early on in these communities of agrarian society. They didn't have a lot of choice in other words, but as long as they adhere to all of this, they had pretty good times and typically that get together and they would have dances, they would do whatever. They had pretty interesting lives, living within their prescribed purposes. Now, let's say they were farmers. Let's go way out into the wheat field here with these three women and chat with them or overhear them. Let's say this younger woman says, "You know what, I'm thinking about a new purpose in my life. I don't know if I want this existing purpose." Maybe she's heard about this woman, Joan of Arc. Oh, I heard just down the road, there's this girl, Joan of Arc. She's pretty awesome and this older woman goes, "Wait a second. Do you know what happened to Joan of Arc?" Yeah, that's right. It didn't turn out well for Joan of Arc. Then maybe this girl says, "You know what, maybe I'll just invent a new rake. What do you think? Because these rakes, they don't make a lot of sense to me. I have some new ideas for a rake." This other woman may go, wait a second, stop talking like a crazy person. Let me explain the universe to you just for a second. We're a part of a very tiny universe where the center of the universe right here on this planet. God comes in and God tells us just what our purpose is going to be. That's how we are, we were born that way, we'll die that way. What happens then if we obey Him? If we obey Him, God and if we perform in our prescribed purposes, good things happen. We get to dance. We get to eat good food. We get to have a nice society, a good community in where we live. But if we don't, suddenly, a lot of bad stuff happens. Suddenly, if we're actually thinking about our purposes outside of what God has given to us, really bad things happen to us. These are all in hope paintings 500 years ago. Not good things happened basically, if you weren't adhering to your prescribed purpose. She might say, oh yeah, by the way, I like my purpose. That was then, this is now. Now, let's move up a little bit to 150 years ago, to an industrial time. In this industrial time, maybe we're not all manual laborers working. Maybe we're starting to use machines in this industrial society. There are fewer of us needed out in the farmlands out in these communities so we have to go into big cities and start working. What are the jobs in big cities? Well, they tend to be factory jobs and really difficult and repetitive jobs where we have very little choice in what we're doing. We're cogs in a wheel, aren't way. This guy, Emile Durkheim, one of the first modern sociologists of our time, a French sociologist, wrote an interesting book, essentially about the transition between this agrarian society and this industrial society. He entitled it Suicide. Why did the entitle it Suicide? Because he noticed that people were committing suicide at a much higher rate in Europe than before and he wanted to study that carefully. Again, he's one of the very first modern sociologists in our field. Emile Durkheim started studying this carefully, and this is what he said. This is how he concludes his book. He must feel himself more in solidarity with a collective existence which precedes him in time, which survives him, and which encompasses him at all points. He's talking about what to do to maintain some well-being so that you don't feel alienated, so you don't feel like you're distanced from society. You have to somehow feel that you're part of a community, part of a collective existence. If this occurs, he will no longer find the only aim of his conduct in himself and understanding that he's an instrument of a purpose greater than himself, an ego transcending purpose, he's talking about basically. But then he starts asking this really interesting question toward the end of the book, Suicide. What groups are best to start feeling this type of solidarity? He thought very carefully about this, he said, political society, is that how we should coalesce? He said, not in France anyway, he didn't believe that that was the way to do this. How about religious society? Well, in France, at least more and more people are turning away from the church. He said I don't think religious society is the way to do this. Not even the family because we're leaving our families out in these rural settings and moving into the big cities. He didn't feel that the family was the place to collect advice anymore either. He said, interestingly, besides the society of faith, of family, and of politics, there's one other of which no mention has been made, and that is the occupational group or corporation. This is surprising to come from Emile Durkheim because he was a communist. A person who may not have believed in a capitalist system was basically saying this capitalist organization called the corporation, might be the place that we would be able to find some type of transcending purpose. Really amazing to me and very present, I think. Now let's go to post-industrial society, where we are now. We can go back to the 1970s when Studs Terkel wrote this wonderful book called Working, where he interviewed lots and lots of real-world employees doing lots of different things. This is what he concluded. Studs Terkel said work is about the search too, for daily meaning, as well as for daily bread, for recognition as well as for cash, for astonishment rather than torpor. In short, for a life rather than a Monday-Friday dying. That's what this course is all about. This course is about finding purpose through your work. It's about working on purpose and the benefits of working on purpose and working purposefully. The course is really reflecting what's going on right now in our society, it's hard to ignore what you're seeing all the time from big consulting organizations like Deloitte; defining your purpose or Larry Flynt at BlackRock; profit and purpose, or McKinsey and Company; help your employees find purpose or watch them leave you. There are over a dozen Harvard Business Review articles about purpose. You see it all the time now. Some of this is about organization's purpose and mission. Some of it is about employees' purpose and mission, and some of it's about leadership and purposeful leadership. Now, by the way, there are lots of books about this. Here's Ernst Young's business case for purpose where they're talking about both companies as well as employees. Lots of books about this now that we're seeing related to purpose. That's what this massive open online course is all about; about purpose at work. The overview basically starts with an initial lesson; what is purpose? What do we mean by purpose? A lot of you might be wondering, what is Vic talking about when he says purpose, and why is it important? We will talk about that. I'm in a school of public health. A lot of my work has been in the health benefits of having a strong purpose and some of the problems that might happen to your health if you have a very weak purpose. That is what I study. But you know what? We spend most of our waking hours at work. That's why I think work and purpose is so incredibly important. We'll start with this overview, just getting everybody up to speed about what we mean by purpose, why it's important, just giving everybody that baseline background, and then we'll move into purposeful work. By this, the group that I'm hoping to reach here are employees and people who want to become employees. This really is for finding purposeful work, becoming more purposeful in your work, crafting your purpose in your work, how to do that, all of those things, what cultural environment to look for if you want more purpose and your work, that's what we're going to be talking about in lesson 2. Lesson 3 is about purposeful leadership. This really is about leaders, people who want to basically imbue their company with greater purpose, their organization, help their organization find greater purpose, how to build a more purposeful culture, but very importantly, how to engage as a purposeful leader. We'll be talking with some amazing people, some of the world's experts on purposeful leadership as we get into lesson 3. Really looking forward to this class. Now, if you want a little background on this class, you might also want to take another course that I've already developed called Finding Purpose and Meaning in Life, Living for What Matters Most. That is another Coursera, University of Michigan course. This would give you a very deep background, I hope anyway, on finding purpose and meaning in life, giving you that background, and that would just be a really nice segue into this course if you would like to do that. But otherwise, if you just want to start with this course, no problem at all. Everything is set up for you to learn more about working on purpose.
