Book Review: Clive Wilson,Designing the Purposeful Organization: How to Inspire Business Performance Beyond Boundaries

Everything in this world has a purpose or a reason to exist. Every organization also, must have a purpose for its existence; question is ‘Why’?

Designing the purposeful organization: How to inspire business performance beyond boundaries is most helpful for organizational architects, a group of organizational development (OD) professionals, the leaders and human resource professionals to find this out.

The title of the book defines it well and gives a glimpse of the contents. The outer cover bears the picture of ‘Nautilus shell’, a symbol of growth and evolution.

The book begins with the purpose and slowly moves with the steps which align ‘why’ with various steps of designing the purposeful organization. An organization sustains due to reasons such as profit, customer satisfaction, social empowerment and social improvement. The book will help organizational architects to find the best possible answer of ‘why are we here’.

The way the book has been designed, it helps one become more creative and revives the thinking process. It is a perfect blend of real work-life experience with natural world examples.

Clive Wilson is a man with a diversified profile. He is a writer, speaker, facilitator and business coach. He is a director of Primeast, a learning and developing company.

This is his seventh book, and the previous works include the following:

Liberate your talent—A pocket book. It focuses on talent, its use and how to add value to others and ourselves.

Mango paradise—It focuses on how seven friends are engaged with passion and also shows how villagers earn money from tourism at very basic eco level.

From the tools to the top: The life and time of Sir Graham Hall—A biography.

Poetry from the soul—It is a collection of poems.

A meditation on our lord’s prayer—A little booklet thoughts on the most famous prayer in the world.

Prime Focus—Focusing the best of your people on prime performance—This book is a combination of prime focus from 2007 and talent liberation from 2009.

The book contains eight chapters. These flow smoothly and are well connected, since all the eight concepts complement each other. As the reader moves forward, he finds the book moving smoothly with a lot of concept building via lively examples. Each chapter is practically applicable and contains lots of case studies, examples, activities and questions to find the real position of one’s organization. At the end of each chapter, the author recommends, some further reading, to make things more clear.

This is a well-researched and practically an applicable book in which writer connects the eight concepts, purpose, vision, engagement, structure, character, results, success and talent, with the title.

The first chapter, ‘The Power of Compelling Purpose’, starts with the very basic question of ‘why’ and focuses on the power of ‘why’. As every creature has some purpose of existence, so does an organization. The author also describes that purpose is context-driven, strategic anchor and stakeholder-driven. Throughout the chapter, a complete guideline has been drawn on how to help an organization find the answer to ‘why’ or the purpose of its existence.

The second chapter, ‘Clarity of Vision’, starts with the activity to search the meaning of the vision in the dictionary. Vision answers the question: Where we are going? The chapter starts from defining vision to share the vision to owning and aligning perspectives.

Through examples, the author describes that vision can arise in any unusual situations, and it is an ongoing process. On a regular basis, the leader must keep eyes on vision statement, so that it can never be outdated.

The third chapter, ‘Engaging to Create a Learning Ecosystem’, details the concept of engagement, its impact and few frameworks like ELAS (engage–learn–apply–sustain), SCEI (socialization, combination, externalization, internalization) and 6Ds (define, design, deliver, drive, deploy, document), which are practised by the most effective learning organization. The author also emphasized that engagement must have some purpose because it is meaningless without it. An example of the natural world is beautifully linked to engagement lessons. Like other chapters, this chapter also ends with a question on engagement and further reading suggestions.

The fourth chapter, ‘Building Structure to Deliver’, talks about structure. A structure describes physical structure, system, processes, plans, policies, account reports, meeting, diaries and e-mail. The author helps us realize that everything inside or outside the organization works under a structure. All the eight concepts mentioned in the introduction are aptly linked with the structure. At the end, following four elements are taken into consideration for keeping things simple:

Widespread simplicity.

Reduction.

Redundancy principle.

The visibility principle.

The fifth chapter, ‘Strength of Character’, reviews the character and its determinants, such as beliefs, values, behaviour and its impact on purposeful organization. Character and culture are used interchangeably throughout the chapter. The author uses research and models to straighten the character with purposes like Globe Smart, Barrett Values Center and Human Synergistics. The main focus of the chapter is in the personal story of author’s leadership journey and his realization about the importance of character for organization success.

The sixth chapter, ‘Result to Track Purposeful Progress’, starts with a 10-step guideline (purpose, vision, outcome, targets, representation, sharing, alignment, story, response and success) which helps in targeting and achieving powerful results. All the steps are well defined and supported by ample case studies and examples.

The seventh chapter, ‘The Secret of Success’, reviews a journey of personal success to shared success. This is well linked with the basic concept of the book, that is the purpose of organizations.

The most interesting part is that we can apply this chapter guideline not only for the organizational level but also for the individual level.

The eighth chapter, ‘Liberating our Talents’, talks about the connection between talent and success. While defining talent, the author focuses on three elements (competence, talent and strength). In an organization, people use all three elements interchangeably, but they are different in meaning. If an organization uses all the three concepts separately, it can enhance the performance significantly. The chapter also talks about the secret that success of any organization lies in talent recognition, its value, how it develops and its use towards organizational objectives. The chapter ends with defining the eight steps of talent alignments.

This book is particularly very useful for those who work as an organizational architect.

One more chapter (A call to action) is included at the end of the book, which consists of a gist of all the eight chapters and one activity to make things easier to understand.

This book is a journey from concept building to practical experience. One can always use it as a fundamental base for organizational development. It is a journey that needs a lot of exercise and techniques. The focal point being the purpose of this book, all the other topics move around the periphery of focal.

The author also highlights the importance of stakeholder. So, while deciding or exploring the nature of purpose, we must also consider our stakeholders.

The most important work for an organization is to visualize a clear path from purpose to performance, which the author clearly mentions in an easy way.

Therefore, it gives a clear idea to understand the path from purpose to success through exercises, activities, extra reading and case studies.