Valerie Keller and Cheryl Grise of the newly-formed EY Beacon Institute stopped by HuffPost Live at Davos on Saturday to talk about the need for purpose in the workplace.
Grise said millennials entering the workforce today are “looking for more than creating products and services, they’re looking for creating products and services for well-being.”
“It’s about a sense of meaning, too, like, ‘what I do matters every day,'” Keller added.
Grise and Keller said a sense of purpose can transform a company, and transformation leads to more success.
“Today you can’t stop transforming, you can’t. You won’t survive in today’s environment,” Grise said.
Based on their research, Keller and Grise said companies should aim to transform by evaluating their purpose and looking to their employees.
“Can they understand [they’re purpose]? Can they articulate it?” Grise said.
Keller said she is seeing more mission statements that don’t aim to describe what a company does, but why a company does what it does.
“It can’t just be a tag line,” Grise said. “You have to really live it.”
Below, live updates from the 2015 Davos Annual Meeting:
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“Nobody wants to go home for Thanksgiving or a wedding or a birthday party and feel they’re defending their company,” Finucane said. “They want to be proud of their company.”
“So we really had to sit and get real on this and talk about, well, what is our purpose?” she added.
Finucane said Bank of America quit looking at social responsibility as philanthropy, instead looking at employment practices, business practices, environmental practices and more in a way that would reflect the values of employees.
Anne Finucane, global chief strategy & marketing officer at Bank of America, shared a personal story while with Arianna at Davos on Friday.
“When I was a young girl, nine years old, I lost my hearing,” Finucane said.
Finucane said she was placed at the back of the classroom while she struggled with her hearing, and suddenly she “felt what it was like to be excluded.”
She regained her hearing six months later, but said the observations she made while she was without one of her five senses have helped her “in extraordinary ways throughout the rest of my life.”
IMAX CEO Rich Gelfond talks with HuffPost Live about where he sees movie theaters in today’s entertainment industry.
McDonough argued it’s time to stop carbon releases and greenhouse gas emissions, because “a material in the wrong place is a toxin.”
“It took us 13 years to get lead out of gasoline because of our children’s brains. When are we going to get the carbon out of the atmosphere? It’s a toxin… It’s obvious to anybody with half a whit.”
“This is a fundamental issue of human rights and of intelligence for the future,” he added.
McDonough spoke about creating biodegradable packaging made from corn stalks.
“Why wouldn’t corn flakes be in a package made from corn stalks?” McDonough said.
